Encoding conventions have as major goal to make the data more readable and so easily accessible. These conventions have so to be respected when modifying or adding some data to our database. By not respecting them, you could loose data coherence and have some certificates wrongly listed when making some searchs or printing some listings. Also some formats have to be respected (dates for example) and could differ from the standard used in your country ( USA : month/day/year and Europe : day/month/year). All of them are explained here under and concern : the name of the certificate, its type, the country of registered office , the country of main activity, the registered office, the state, the date of issue and creation, the capital and the number of shares issued, the couleur and the type of decoration.

For the name of the certificate, or more simply of the company, all 'common' names have, if present at the beginning, been moved to the end. They are : Company or Compagnie (abbreviated CO.), Société Anonyme (abbreviated S.A.), Société (abbreviated SOC.), Belge or any other country name, National, Générale and all adjectifs. In order to note this, a comma followed by a space has been put before what has been moved to the end. So for example, the company "Société Anonyme Belge de Tramways" has been encoded as "TRAMWAYS, S.A. BELGE DE". All names have been written in upper case without accentuation to the exception of the ¨. More examples are given on an extra page and will probably clarify previous explanation. Click here to review these examples.
For certificates written in various languages, the different translations have been separated with a '/'. Nevertheless, for foreign languages not usually known (hungarian, polish, ...), an english transalation has sometimes been given. For the bonds issued by the cities and states, a special convention is applicable. Click here to review it.
Finally, it has been noted that a same certificate has been encoded twice if it has been found in issued or inussued form. The unissued certificate can either be a specimen, a blanco (no number neither signatures) or a certificate missing a signature and/or a number. This is noted by addind 'spec.' in the description of the type of certificate. No further distinction ahs been made between the different types of issued and non issued certificates. So for example certificates hole, strip or pen cancelled or simply uncancelled will be the same. This will nevertheless be annoted as an extra information on the conservation state as it can influence its price.

The type of certificate has been tiped as written on the certificate and in its language.

The country of registered office is usually the country of the registered office but can also be the country of the devise of the certificate. For example, an american Company issuing bonds in Deutsche Marc will have Germany as country of registered office. The country of activity is the country where the company has its main activity or the country where the company historically started. It is not possible to enter various countries if the activity is spread over different areas.

The registered office has been put as written on the certificate and so in its language. A same city will can so be found with different spellings : Bruxelles, Brussels, Brussel, ...

The state is, if applicable, the state in which the company has its mais activity and is not the state in which the company is registered.

Click here to get more infos on the format used in the dates and the meaning of the fields 'hand written', numbre of issued shares and 'total emission'. The date of creation is the year the company existed first with shares issued. The capital is the capital issued where the 000 are separated with a . and without specifying the dvise if this one is the same as the one in the description of the type of certificate.

The colors have been entered in english separated with a comma. The black color is entered also and this is almost the case as the text is usually written in black. So if you only find a blue color for example, this means that the text is written in blue.

The field decoration gives an idea if the certificate is decorative or not. For example: DDD, DD, ED, ... . Click here for a description of the various possibilities.

Finally, it has to be noted that these directives were not always respected as data were sometimes entered as given by the various auction houses from which data were collected.