Guides

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

• 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.
• What an electronic signature audit trail actually recordsAn audit trail is only worth having if it can answer a question somebody asks you two years later, under pressure, about a document you no longer remember.
• 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.
• How electronic signatures workThe mechanics, end to end, with the parts that are cryptography separated from the parts that are just process.
• 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.

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