How to Digitally Stamp a Document

In India, stamp duty payment is often required when executing specific types of documents. Traditionally, this involves the purchase of physical stamps or stamp papers, which is a time-consuming and complex process. 

To simplify this, Leegality offers a digital way to pay stamp duty - BharatStamp. 

Paying stamp duty through Leegality's BharatStamp involves three key actions, each designed to make this legal requirement swift, secure, and convenient.

A. Creating a Stamp Series: This step is ideal when the stamp duty for a document is of a fixed value. We'll walk you through how to generate a series of digital stamp papers with a specific denomination.

B: Forming a Dynamic Stamp Group: This is designed for instances when the stamp duty is ad-valorem, or proportional to the transaction value. Our guide will help you create a dynamic group that selects stamp papers based on each document's unique stamp value.

C: Attaching Digital Stamp Papers to a Document: The final step involves affixing your digital stamp papers to the relevant document and sending it for eSigning.

Harnessing the power of BharatStamp, you can complete these tasks anytime, anywhere, making the process of paying stamp duty in India a breeze.

Let’s take a look at the three stamping actions in detail:

A. Creating Stamp Series

In India - most stamp paper is available only in physical form. So Leegality procures physical stamp papers and then digitizes it. To procure stamp paper, you will first need to create a “stamp series”.

A Stamp Series is a collection of stamps of 1 denomination of 1 particular state. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: In your Leegality dashboard, on your left sidebar, click on “STAMPS”

Step 2: Next, click on “New Stamp Series” button on top right corner

You will get a stamp request form. 

Step 3: Fill out all the required fields pertaining to the stamp papers

Step 4: Next, provide your contact details for Leegality to ship the papers to you for your records

Leegality will make the stamp papers available digitally in your dashboard within 7 to 10 working days of placing your order. We need this time to procure AND digitize the physical papers in a compliant manner. 

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B. Forming Dynamic Stamp Group

Sometimes, a single stamp series is not enough to actually digitally stamp a document. Consider 2 scenarios:

1. You need to pay Rs. 700 fixed stamp duty on a document. However the State in which you are paying it does not offer stamp papers of Rs. 700 denomination.
2. Your stamp duty value is not fixed - but is instead calculated as a percentage of the value of the document you are executing. So the stamp duty payable in each transaction will differ. 

In both scenarios, you will need to combine stamp papers from different stamp series in order to comply fully with stamp duty requirements. This is exactly what “Dynamic Stamp Groups” allow you to do.

With Dynamic Stamp Groups, you pick the value for a particular transaction and our algorithm will pick and choose the right stamp papers to satisfy that requirement. 

Here’s how you can set up Dynamic Stamp Groups:

Step 1: In Leegality’s dashboard, go to the Stamps tab under “My drawer” and click on Groups

Step 2: Next, click on “New Stamp Group” button and follow the instructions below:

1. Set the Group Name
2. Select the state you want to associate with this Group Name 
3. Enter the maximum value for this stamp group (the highest value that can be achieved using any combination of stamp papers in this group)
4. Then select the series of concerned states to be included in this group

Step 3: Click on create button to finish creating your Dynamic Stamp Group.

Now that you have created the Stamp Series or Dynamic Stamp Group, it’s time to use it to stamp your relevant documents. 

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C. Attaching Digital Stamp Papers to the Document

After you’ve procured the stamp papers, you still need to ensure they are affixed on a document. Here’s how to do that on Leegality:

Step 1: On your Leegality Dashboard, click on “New Document” to start a new document signing journey.

Step 2: Attach the document you want to digitally stamp and sign. Then turn on the “Use Stamp” toggle. Depending on whether you want to use a Stamp Series or a Stamp Group, turn on the “Use Stamp Series” or “Use Stamp Group” toggle.

Step 3: Next, select the relevant Stamp Series/ Stamp Group.

Step 4: In case of a Stamp Group, enter the stamp duty value required for the document

Step 5: Fill in the contact details of the invitees and choose the signature type you want them to eSign the document with.

Step 6: To see the final collection of stamp papers attached to your document, click on the “Load More Stamp Papers” button. 

The above describes the manual process. If you execute high volumes of documents per day - this manual process is not scalable. To automate this process, you can use Leegality Smart Workflows or Leegality API. 

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