All growing businesses at a certain stage begin to experience the same issue. The processes that once worked for them now start to slow them down a lot. An excellent example is document signing. At this stage, having to print a couple of agreements, then get them handwritten and signed, and after that scan the documents and keep them manually can easily work for a small company. Yet, a growing and expanding customer base, an ever bigger team of staff and vendors, and a huge volume of documents to work with will eventually mean the same process will become really hard to control.
The use of a digital signature app is actually an improved way of managing important business documents, and the process can be a great step towards making such a business grow bigger and even be able to go nationwide and internationally. A good digital signature app can move signing online, cut the number of follow-ups required, offer better tracking of documents, and give permission to people in different locations to sign documents electronically.
That means the question that a growing company might ask themselves is ‘At what point should they switch to a digital signature solution?.
Why Manual Document Signing Gets Harder as a Business Grows
Sometimes, when a business grows, it results in more paperwork. For example, hiring new employees would lead to more HR documents. Also, having more customers would mean additional contracts, and enlarging the supplier network would result in vendor agreements and purchase approvals.
Involving more people to review and approve documents will accompany having more documents. Employees might be busy attaching files, confirming whether documents got signed, sending stakeholders messages, and checking for completed copies.
A workflow that handles a mere 10 documents would definitely not suffice once the business is dealing with hundreds of them. Because of this, at least for the digital signature app, the change to an app will help establish a signing process that can be managed more effectively as document volumes keep increasing.
When Should You Switch to a Digital Signature App?
1. Your Team Spends Too Much Time Chasing Signatures
Looking after one’s paperwork can be only a matter of minutes, but when the total amount of contracts and approvals handled by your staff gets high, they can quickly add up hours.
If your employees often write out mail or send messages to clients, managers, or vendors to sign documents again, it’s a clear sign that the process is generating redundant tasks.
Online signings will give users the power to see and monitor who needs to sign on to pending documents. Solutions with the features of notifications and automatic reminders also help in avoiding manual follow-ups with everyone involved by the employees.
2. Your Document Volume Is Increasing
Larger companies naturally generate a much larger number of contracts, offer letters, vendor agreements, NDAs, financial approvals, and other vital documents.
Keeping these files up to date via email becomes a problem over time. The staff will sometimes have trouble finding where the last version is or checking if the job has already been completed.
A digital signatures app enables you to work through document processing efficiently while your document volume grows without a rise in administrative tasks.
It’s a good idea for businesses to imagine a situation where they might be handling double the volume in documents if not for their current signing system and check if the latter is still efficient under such circumstances.
3. Approvals Are Slowing Down Business Activities
Delay at the level of one document usually results in the entire set of documents being delayed since the interdependency principle is one major principle that should not be ignored in the workplace. Sales teams are one of those that would have to be held off of the next stage of a project if they did not have a contract on record. HR cannot carry out the procedures for integrating an employee unless the letter of offer has been greenlit, and maybe the procurement department would get a go-ahead before they are able to engage with a third-party supplier.
An operation in which major projects keep on being hampered by truth is the documents still have to be physically printed, signed, and returned. It could be safely concluded that an activity of authorisation has been found out to be the main reason for the bottleneck.
Change your methods from pen-and-paper to e-signatures so that a document can be sent to a person instantly irrespective of the distance and time, as well, without requiring any paper trails as before
4. Multiple Signers Are Becoming Difficult to Manage
As companies scale up, the level of bureaucracy and control in their systems increases. Whereas once signing a document was limited to one person, it might become multi-signed after the manager, finance officer, senior executive, and even someone outside.
This approach of getting everyone’s signatures through separate email file attachments tends to create much confusion. One never knows which version is the correct latest one, and one also doesn’t know who the next person is that is supposed to sign off.
By having a digital signature app which is set up to send to many and also determine the order of the signatories, one gets a much simpler process to follow. Stakeholders will be able to see and sign the document the moment the document reaches their particular level instead of people having to get together with paper and ink after every handover.
5. You Are Losing Visibility Over Document Status
An employee of a company is always asking questions such as, “Did the client already sign the agreement?
It indicates clearly that he/she is very much concerned about the document being traced. It might be that apart from having a paper trail, they should also have other team members informed about which documents have been issued or read and signed and which still need someone’s action.
Moving the signing process to an online environment and having a signing system will also be able to verify signers, add timestamping, document tracking, tamper evidence detection, and record audit trails is one way a company can use an online digital tool like EazeeSign.
Better visibility would result in greater efficiency of staff members who would have a look at pending tasks at the level at which they don’t constitute an emergency.
6. Remote Signing Has Become a Regular Requirement
Businesses on the rise are more likely to have their workforce, leadership, and vendors spread across different parts of the world. Clearly, in such cases, document approval may also depend on the availability of the concerned party who might be travelling or working remotely away from the office.
Waiting for a staff member to come back to work for a face-to-face signing is not always a feasible way of doing business, in particular for digital companies, which are so fast and rely so greatly on digital communication.
This is where a digital signature app like EazeeSign comes in handy. Apart from using paper and pen to sign documents, users gain another method of signing, which can be done from mobile phones, etc. That is a great way of avoiding document delays when a signer of a document cannot happen to be at their desk during the process.
7. Important Documents Need Stronger Verification
With the expansion of businesses, the importance and confidentiality of their documents may also rise. Sensitive documents such as agreements, contracts, personnel records, and commercial papers, among others, may call for greater certainty about signatures and that the documents have not been altered after signing.
Digital signatures offer identity authentication, cryptographic timestamps, and tamper-resistance features that quite a bit increase document credibility. They can also keep a signed document’s integrity record over time.
This feature gets more practical when a company or individual wants to have a higher level of transparency for crucial documents.
What Should Growing Businesses Look for in a Digital Signature App?
Scalability is an essential factor. The service must support growing numbers of document users, recipients, and approvals as the company grows.
When it comes to confidentiality agreements, signer verification, document integrity, and audit trails are also significant. The company can find out if they can monitor document status and locate those that need attention easily. They should make sure they have the option of keeping an audit trail if they need to at some point.
For managers and staff members who are off-site most days, mobile access can make a significant positive change. Also, multi-signer workflow support can help in cases of a complicated authorisation process.
Last but not least, think about document management and integrations. The signed documents should be available for instant retrieval or at least be able to be located quickly. For instance, an organization growing big may find that their signing software has to be compatible with other systems used in their HR/sales departments, etc.
Conclusion
Expanding a business typically reveals areas or operations that were effective in the past when the enterprise was not so big. Document signing is such an area. A greater number of documents, various signing personnel, different time zones of remote collaborators, and continuous follow-ups can eventually make the paper signing process quite difficult to handle.
By enabling signing to occur online, enhancing sign-off visibility, allowing remote access, and generating more accurate signing records, a digital signature app brings about quite a bit more efficient means of handling signing processes.
Besides, a business doesn’t need to completely abandon a manually signed process before making a digital change is warranted; the key consideration here is that once the manual process starts to be quite time-consuming and detracts from the time you could use to develop the business further, a digital move would be a reasonable choice.
FAQs
When should a business switch to a digital signature app?
A company should think of making the transition once the number of documents gets higher, or the approvals are constantly being backed up, or the workers are spending too much of their time chasing signatures, or lots of different persons have to sign documents that are located in different places.
Can a digital signature app handle multiple signers?
If you pick the right tool, the document routing options will vary. In the case of work-orientated apps, they are quite likely to be supporting multiple users, with different signing orders, and documents are passing through various stakeholders following the approval pathway.
What should growing businesses look for in a digital signature app?
A digital signature app can be a helpful tool for businesses as it allows them to scale and is very user-friendly, meeting signer verification, document tracking, audit trails, mobile accessibility, multi-signer workflows, document management, security, and integration capabilities requirements for business.
Is a digital signature different from an electronic signature?
Yes, an electronic signature basically means the use of electronic methods. Digital signature goes one step ahead by providing a way to validate signers’ identities, which are tied to unique cryptographic elements that also help determine whether a document remained unchanged since the moment of signing.