Guides

How document execution actually works — written from what we built, not from a summary of somebody else’s summary.

• Are electronic signatures legally binding?Electronic signatures can be legally effective in the US and EU, but the transaction, consent, authority, formalities and evidence still matter.
• What a certificate of completion proves — and what it does notThe document you hand to a court, a bank or an auditor, and the one question to ask of it before you rely on it.
• Which documents can't be signed electronically in the US?Most business agreements can be signed electronically. A short list of documents falls outside the federal ESIGN Act, and getting one of them wrong is expensive.
• Electronic signature audit trail: what should it record?An electronic signature audit trail is a chronological record connecting people, actions, authentication and the exact document version.
• Electronic signature vs digital signature: the real differencePeople use the two terms interchangeably, and vendors let them. One describes what the law accepts as signing, the other describes a way of proving a file has not changed.
• ESIGN, UETA and eIDAS — what each one actually asks forThree frameworks, two continents, and a short list of things your system must record if you want the signature to hold up.
• Free electronic signature: what a free plan should includeFree plans differ less in how many documents you can send than in what happens to your evidence when you stop paying.
• How electronic signatures workThe mechanics, end to end, with the parts that are cryptography separated from the parts that are just process.
• How to add a signature to a Word documentWord can place a visible signature in a document, while an e-signature workflow records who acted and preserves evidence around the signed file.
• How to sign a document as power of attorneyAn agent usually signs the principal's name, then identifies themselves and their authority, but the required form varies by document and jurisdiction.
• How to sign a PDF electronically in 6 stepsUpload, assign fields, choose identity assurance, send, sign and retain the completed PDF with its evidence.
• Sequential, parallel and conditional signing explainedRouting is the part of e-signature software people get wrong first, because the default is almost never what the agreement actually needs.
• How to verify a signed document without trusting the vendorIf verification requires the vendor's website to be up and your account to still exist, it is not verification.
• eIDAS 2 relying-party registrationThe December 2026 registration precondition for organisations that request data from EU Digital Identity Wallets.
• EUDI wallet acceptanceHow the 24 December 2027 acceptance date is computed, who is in scope, and what the obligation actually requires.

Written from the system we built. Where a guide describes something Pactlyra does not do yet, it says so rather than implying otherwise.