We're announcing our partnership with FirmaTech, a certification service provider accredited by the National Directorate of Electronic Signature of Panama's Public Registry. Starting today, we handle, issue and put into operation qualified electronic signature certificates for our clients — in minutes, not weeks.
The point: speed
FirmaTech's platform takes requests 24 hours a day and issues the certificate in minutes once identity is validated. Certificates are valid for 1 or 2 years.
That changes the usual scenario. An expired certificate stops invoicing for an entire company, and it's always discovered on the worst day of the month. A business that opens today no longer has to wait for the paperwork to come through before it starts invoicing. And a PAC migration no longer drags on for weeks waiting for the one missing document.
Why you need it
Panama's tax authority (DGI) requires every electronic invoice to be signed with a qualified electronic certificate. It isn't optional. When you issue a document through your PAC, the PAC signs it using your certificate, in your name or your company's.
And since January 2026 the rule got stricter: the free SFEP invoicing tool is now limited to taxpayers with gross annual income of up to B/.36,000 and up to 100 electronic documents a month. Anyone who exceeds either limit must hire a PAC — and with the PAC comes the certificate requirement.
What a qualified signature is, in short
Law 51 of 2008, as amended by Law 82 of 2012, gives a qualified electronic signature the same legal force as a handwritten signature. It is the type of signature with the greatest evidentiary weight in Panama and is presumed valid from the start: whoever challenges it has to prove otherwise, not the other way around.
The certificate is the pen you sign with in the digital world. Without it, your ERP can generate the document, but nobody can seal it.
What we add
Issuance is fast. What usually holds people up is everything that happens around it, and that's where we come in:
- Choosing the right certificate — there's one for a legal entity that invoices, one for an individual who invoices and a citizen certificate for signing any kind of document. Choosing the wrong one costs time.
- Guided identity verification — we tell you exactly what you need before you start, so the process doesn't fall apart halfway through.
- Installation in your invoicing — we load the certificate into your PAC and your ERP, and issue a test document with you present. We don't hand you a file and wish you luck.
- Expiration tracking — we notify you before it expires, with time to renew without shutting down your operation.
Beyond the invoice
The same ecosystem handles cases that aren't tax-related:
- Signing contracts and employment documents with full legal validity, from the signing platform.
- Sending documents for third parties to sign — customers, vendors or employees, with tracking of the process.
- API integration with your ERP, CRM, portal or app, so your users sign within your own workflow without leaving the system.
- Validation of received signatures — there's a validator that confirms whether a document you received is signed with a qualified certificate, whether it has a timestamp and whether it keeps long-term validity.
Where to start
If you already invoice electronically and your certificate is about to expire, write to us before it does. If you're moving off the free invoicing tool, the certificate is one of the three pieces you need, along with the PAC and the invoice folios: we set up the whole thing, not piece by piece.