eNotarization for Businesses: How Companies Notarize Documents at Scale

eNotarization lets a Philippine company have its documents notarized online by a commissioned Electronic Notary Public, at whatever volume it needs, without a messenger in the loop. Here is how businesses set it up on Twala.

In most offices the routine hasn’t changed in decades. A secretary’s certificate is printed in Makati and signed by the corporate secretary. Someone carries it to a notary near city hall, waits, then sends it by courier to the bank in Cebu that asked for it. Multiply that by every special power of attorney, service agreement, and quitclaim in a year, and notarization becomes one of the quieter costs of running a company in the Philippines.

That trip is now optional. Under the Supreme Court’s Rules on Electronic Notarization (A.M. No. 24-10-14-SC), an Electronic Notary Public (ENP) can notarize an electronic document for parties anywhere in the country, through an accredited Electronic Notarization Facility (ENF). Twala is one of the first three ENFs the Court accredited, and it already serves more than 600 companies for signing and document work. For many of them, eNotarization is one more step inside a tool they open every day.

What companies notarize, and what never needed a notary

Start with an inventory, because a good share of business paperwork doesn’t need a notary at all. Under the Civil Code, a contract is valid and binding once consent, object, and cause are present, and the law asks for a public document only in specific cases, most notably rights over real property. Under the Electronic Commerce Act (R.A. 8792), an electronic signature carries legal weight. Those documents can be signed with eSignature and filed the same day. If you’re unsure which is which, our guide to eSignature, digital signature, and eNotarization works through the decision.

The documents that do go to a notary are usually the ones a third party relies on, or the ones the law wants in a public document. In a typical company, the list looks like this:

• Secretary’s certificates attesting to board resolutions and to who may sign for the corporation
• Special and general powers of attorney, and authorization letters
• Service agreements, memorandums of agreement, and other contracts a counterparty wants notarized
• Lease agreements for offices, warehouses, and branches
• Loan, credit, and mortgage agreements
• Quitclaims and waivers, and the affidavits employees and officers execute
• Deeds of sale, donation, or assignment

Every item on that list is a document type an ENP can notarize on Twala. Notarial wills and depositions are not covered, and neither is a paper document with wet signatures that has to stay on paper.

How a company appears before a notary

A corporation can’t sit in front of a camera, so its authorized signatory does. On Twala, that person goes through the same steps as any other principal:

1. They verify their identity once, with a Philippine National ID checked against the national registry or another government-issued ID, followed by a face scan. The verification stays current until the ID expires or for three years, whichever comes first.
2. They sign on Twala with Twala’s secure digital signature. For an acknowledgment, the usual act for contracts, deeds, and powers of attorney, everyone can sign through an envelope before the session and then confirm their signatures to the ENP. A secretary’s certificate the secretary swears to is notarized with a jurat, and the Rules have the signatory sign as part of the act itself, so book first and ask the ENP on the appointment’s Messages tab when to sign.
3. They appear before the ENP, over live video in a remote session or face to face in an in-person one, with proof of their authority to sign: usually a board resolution or a secretary’s certificate.

Everyone in a session, the notary included, has to be in the Philippines, and Twala checks each person’s location as they join. Beyond that, distance stops mattering. A signatory in Davao, a counterparty in Quezon City, and an ENP in Iloilo can all appear in the same remote session. The screen-by-screen version is in how to notarize a document online.

Setting up your team

Notarization inside a company is rarely one person’s job. Legal drafts, the corporate secretary certifies, someone in operations books the session, and finance pays. Twala is built around that division of labor.

• Roles. Each team member is an Owner, an Admin, or a Member. Owners and admins decide, person by person, who can use notary features and who can use AI, so requesting notarizations stays with the people you authorize.
• Workspaces. Team workspaces are private until shared. Corporate records, HR files, and client matters can live apart, and each teammate gets no access, view access, or edit access, item by item.
• Templates and envelopes. Reusable signing templates keep roles and fields in place for the documents you send most. An envelope can carry several documents and recipients, with signers, approvers, and viewers acting in the order you set, plus automatic reminders.
• Search and reports. Press ⌘K to find any envelope, notarization, file, or template by name. Envelope reports and file inventories export as CSV or PDF, for your records or your auditor’s.

The Business and Business Plus plans add team management, custom branding, and a Business verified digital seal.

What scales, and what doesn’t

It helps to be precise about volume. eNotarization doesn’t batch the notarial act. Each act needs its principals to appear before an ENP, live, and gets its own entry in the notarial register. The Rules treat a videoconference as the equivalent of physical appearance, and they prohibit pre-recorded videos of signing. A hundred employees signing quitclaims still means a hundred appearances.

What scales is everything around the act. Each person verifies their identity once, and the verification holds for up to three years. Templates and envelopes take drafting and signing off the critical path. And sessions no longer depend on where your people are: an ENP’s authority covers the whole country, so a team in Cebu or Davao can book a remote session with an ENP anywhere in the Philippines, choosing one by name or by city. For an in-person session you need an ENP who can meet you, and searching by city is how you find one. Teams that want to connect Twala to their own systems can start with the developer documentation for the Twala API.

What enterprise IT and compliance will ask

Every accredited ENF has to clear the same technical baseline under the Rules, including e-KYC consistent with Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas rules, multi-factor authentication, liveness detection, geolocation that detects VPNs, and tamper-evident security. Accreditation is the floor. A compliance team should look at what sits above it.

On Twala, that starts with identity: a Philippine National ID is checked against the national registry through the QR code on the card, and identity checks are aligned with the BSP’s e-KYC and authentication guidelines and with NIST SP 800-63-3. Every sealed document can be verified through HashOrigin™ without relying on Twala as a single point of trust. The Enterprise plan adds single sign-on through SAML or OpenID Connect, advanced logging, SIEM integration, a PKI digital seal, advanced reporting, a guaranteed SLA, and premium support. Underneath every account, the platform checks permissions on every request, allows one sign-in at a time, supports two-factor authentication, and keeps an audit log protected by HMAC-SHA256 integrity checks.

Personal data is handled under the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (R.A. 10173), with a Privacy Manual and a Data Protection Officer, and Twala is working toward certification under ISO/IEC 27001. Lex, the AI inside Twala, runs privately under Twala’s own cloud account, and no user data is ever used to train it. The trust center lists each control, and inside Twala’s security explains how they protect a notarized document.

Proof that travels with the document

A notarized document is only as useful as the recipient’s ability to trust it. When the notarial fee is paid, Twala adds the notarial certificate page and the notary’s seal with a QR code, enters the act in the notary’s notarial register, and files it with the Supreme Court. The file is sealed as a PDF/A-2b with a digital signature, and its fingerprint is anchored on the Polygon blockchain through HashOrigin.

The bank, government office, or counterparty on the other end checks the file on Twala’s verify page, where any change made after notarization shows as Document tampered. Send the PDF, not a printout. Our guide to verifying an eNotarized document is worth forwarding to the teams who receive them.

What to change in your internal policy

The software is the easy part. The paper habit written into company procedures is harder to move.

A short list to start with:

1. Map your documents. Mark which ones need notarization, which need only eSignature, and which still have to stay on paper.
2. Keep signing authority current. Hold an up-to-date board resolution or secretary’s certificate for every officer who signs, ready to show the ENP.
3. Decide who books. Turn on notary features only for the people who should request notarizations, and agree on who pays the fees.
4. Accept what you ask others to send. If your company requires notarized documents from suppliers, customers, or employees, accept eNotarized PDFs and verify them instead of asking for paper.
5. Store notarized documents where you can find them. Keep them in a team workspace with version history, tags, and search, not in someone’s inbox.

What it costs

There are two parts. The first is the platform. Business costs ₱1,690 per seat a month or ₱16,900 a year, with a minimum of three seats. Business Plus costs ₱2,390 a month or ₱23,900 a year per seat, and Enterprise is priced to your requirements. Prices are VAT inclusive, and signing is always free for the people you send documents to. Pricing lists the limits on each plan.

The second is each notarial act: the notarial fee the ENP sets, 12% VAT, and documentary stamp tax, paid online or in cash if the notary allows it. How much online notarization costs has the detail.

Set that against what the paper version costs you now: printing, couriers, messenger hours, and the days a deal waits for a stamp. Twala’s own numbers put the difference at 80% faster turnaround and 40% less spent on time and materials per agreement.

Where to go next

If your team handles a particular kind of paperwork, our guides for HR teams, banks, lending companies, and cooperatives, and real estate go further. Notarizing secretary’s certificates and board resolutions online covers the corporate documents most companies start with, and the complete guide to eNotarization in the Philippines covers the rules.

To set Twala up for your company, talk to our team, or create a free account and try it with a single document first.

Twala is a Supreme Court-accredited Electronic Notarization Facility (ENF). Twala is a technology provider and does not give legal advice. Notarial acts are performed by commissioned Electronic Notaries Public.