Certificate of Good Standing

A certificate of good standing is a state-issued document confirming a company is registered, active, and current on its obligations there. Include certificateOfGoodStanding in POST /orders with the existing companyId; filingState is the state the certificate is issued from. A foreign qualification can also add one on its own, and changes which state it comes from — both cases are covered in Field requirements.

curl -X POST https://api.fileforms.com/v1/orders \
  -H "x-api-key: sk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "userId": "user_a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8",
    "companyId": "comp_x1y2z3w4v5u6t7s8",
    "filingState": "DE",
    "certificateOfGoodStanding": true
  }'

Field requirements

• The key takes no options. Pass "certificateOfGoodStanding": true.
• companyId is required. A certificate attests to an existing entity's standing, so there is nothing to certify for a company being created in the same request. Combining it with formation returns 400.
• filingState is the state the certificate comes from when the certificate is ordered on its own, which is not necessarily the company's formation state. A company registered in several states can be in good standing in each, and which one you need depends on why you need it: a bank, landlord, or counterparty in another state will usually want that state's own certificate, so that state is the one you name.
• Alongside foreignQualification, the certificate comes from the company's formation state instead. filingState still names the state being qualified into, but the state admitting a foreign entity wants to see a certificate from that entity's domestic state — a certificate from the state you're entering is the one certificate the qualification can't use. The company's formationState must be set on the company record for this; without it the request returns 400.
• You don't have to ask for it: where the qualifying state requires a certificate, one is added to the order automatically. Whether a state requires it depends on the state and the company's entityType — several ask it of corporations but not LLCs, or the reverse — so a foreign qualification resolves the requirement for you and orders the certificate when it applies. It is charged as its own line and returned in items like any other order. Sending "certificateOfGoodStanding": true for a state that already requires one is not an error and does not double-charge: an order carries at most one certificate.
• No registered agent is required. Unlike the filing products, a certificate is a records request — nothing about an agent is needed in the filing state.

What it costs

One-time: the certificate of good standing wholesale price plus the issuing state's fee (see State fees). Unlike formations and foreign qualifications, the state fee doesn't depend on entity type — LLCs and corporations pay the same, and only the state varies.

Repeat orders

Ordering a certificate again for the same company and state is allowed. There's no 409 and no silent skip — unlike foreign qualification, where a second order for a state you've already qualified into is rejected. Each request creates a new order and a new charge.

That's deliberate: certificates are routinely required to be recently issued. Florida wants one issued within the last 30 days to support a foreign qualification, and lenders often ask for a fresh certificate at closing even if you pulled one days earlier.

Because repeat orders are legitimate, nothing on our side will catch an accidental double-submit, and there is no idempotency key — guard against retries in your own integration.

After ordering

A certificate of good standing doesn't move through filing statuses. It isn't a state filing — the certificate is pulled from the state's records, and delivering it is the fulfillment. The order item carries no filingStatus and no filingDate at all; those fields are absent from a certificate item, not null.

• document.uploaded fires when the certificate is available, carrying the orderId of your order, a documentType of certificate_of_good_standing, and a temporary download URL. You can also fetch it later with GET /documents/{documentId}.
• This is the only event a certificate order emits. There is no filing.status_changed for certificates, so don't wait on one.