There is a certain magic to holding an actual book in your hands and flipping through the pages. The feel of the paper, the visual progress, maybe the compelling cover design – those factors make it hard for some people to move to digital reading devices. Luckily, documents that require your signature usually feature none of them. When was the last time you heard anyone say, “Oh, how I miss holding a 100-page contract and manually signing every other page”? And while there are not many downsides to ditching paper signatures, the upsides are plenty.
Moving to eSignatures can dramatically improve your business processes in more than one way: Eliminate hours of wasted time by signing instantly from anywhere, drastically reduce your cost and carbon footprint by eliminating paper, and protect your interests with unprecedented digital security.
The world is going digital, whether we like it or not. Eliminating old-school signatures is an important step to stay ahead of the curve and provide a thriving environment for your business in a digital-first world.
Here’s How eSignatures Help Digitize Your Business
Moving from good old paper and ink to eSignatures is not just one of many incremental improvements that come with time: It’s a quantum leap in the way you do business, allowing you to operate and grow your business seamlessly and providing ample benefits.
| Issue with wet (paper-based) signatures | How eSignatures solve it | Why that matters |
| Wet signatures are slow to coordinate and waste a lot of time | eSignatures are instant, saving minutes if not hours per document | Time is money. Don’t waste any of it chasing signatures. |
| Paper can be copied, modified and forged easily. | eSignatures are legally valid and provide excellent security measures and audit trails. | Fraud is rampant – don’t become a victim. |
| Signing paper documents requires people to be physically present. | eSignatures can be executed from anywhere. | Remote work is here to stay – don’t let it slow down your business. |
| Printing on paper is expensive. | eSignatures come with zero printing cost. | Business is tough – every cent counts. |
| Paper is made from trees – a finite resource | eSignatures are fully digital. | Go green. For your own conscience and for the reputation of your business. |
Let’s look at how the old system is broken and how eSignatures solve each pain point.
eSignatures help you save countless hours – and speed up your business
Paper-based signatures are time-consuming. The printer used to be like a watercooler: People standing around it waiting for their documents to be spat out. Finding the printer, waiting for documents, sorting them, clipping them together, then taking them to Person A for signature, and finally mailing them to Person B to sign – it’s a colossal waste of time, and it gets exponentially worse with increasing complexity and more people signing.
Using eSignatures is just like email – it’s instant. Whether it’s a document sent from your coworker next door, from your law firm on the other side of town, or the customer who’s currently vacationing in the Bahamas, you’ll be able to sign whatever is needed within a few seconds of the other party sending the document. In addition, you might even save a few additional seconds by not having to look for a pen to sign…
In a world of ever-increasing complexity, many processes depend on each other. If no one is ever held up waiting for you – or anyone on your team – to sign something, you’re likely to immediately see an increase in output and the overall speed of your business.
eSignatures are legally valid and more secure than wet signatures
Signature fraud is rampant – forging signatures is a business likely just as old as signatures themselves. Short of an officially verified signature, which is an arduous process few are willing to endure, paper documents can’t be verified easily. In addition, there’s usually no way of backtracking a document’s travel path, making it anyone’s guess who’s handled or even modified it along the way.
Most eSignature platforms provide secure digital verification. Usually, that’s a digital stamp that contains all the available information about the person signing: Time, date, IP address, browser information, and so on. Adding a blockchain-based verification system to the already established control systems further enhances security, providing an immutable track record and complete audit trail.
If an order for more office snacks is forged, that’s annoying but relatively harmless. However, fraud can have devastating consequences when it comes to HR-, legal-, or sales-related documents. Blockchain-based, 100% verifiable, and legal signatures provide the only way to stop worrying about tampered documents.
eSignatures allow you to sign from anywhere
Office attendance is in decline, and WFH is the new normal. Remote work, in general, is on the rise globally, a trend only accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are redefining their lives because of the option to work from anywhere. In addition, flexible work hours are increasingly popular, making getting someone in a room to physically sign a document all the more demanding.
eSignatures don’t care about location. With the ability to sign from any computer or even phone, when it comes to signing documents, remote work has become as convenient, if not more so, than working in the same office. As long as there is an internet connection and some form of input device (a keyboard or mouse for a computer, and simply a finger for a phone), eSignatures can be done from anywhere.
Virtual calls take care of most meetings, but the ability to not worry about the physical presence of signatories takes remote work and the accompanying liberties to the next level. No matter where your boss, assistant, colleague, or client is at the moment – you can get their signature instantly and move on to the next item on the agenda.
eSignatures enable you to cut down on printing cost
Printing a single page is cheap. Printing thousands of pages, not so much. Add to that the cost of the printer itself, which can be in the thousands to purchase upfront or a significant sum every month if you lease it. If you include the cost of time spent picking up documents from a printer somewhere in the office, the total quickly adds up to a significant amount.
With eSignatures, expensive printing is a thing of the past. There is no scenario that requires printing any documents when using eSignatures. Not only are all documents fully digital and therefore free to produce in any quantity desired, but changes don’t require re-printing potentially hundreds of pages: The document can be revoked, and after the change has been made, it’s simply re-sent for signing.
The cost savings for any business are immediate – no more printing documents. Over time, and especially with more complex documents that might require last-minute changes or the signatures of multiple parties, the money saved on both printing documents and physically handling them can make a significant difference in the bottom line.
eSignatures help save the environment
Paper may be cheap to buy, but its ultimate cost to the environment is significant. Printers go through paper much quicker than trees can grow, creating an ever-increasing environmental imbalance. The less paper we use, the better for us – and the generations after us. Add to that the cost of cutting down the trees, of processing the result to actual paper, of packaging and shipping the product to where it’s being sold, and – last but not least – the number of plastic wrappers discarded after all the paper in a package has been used, and you quickly realize that paper isn’t really as harmless as it seems.
No more wasting paper – full stop. eSignatures are fully digital, requiring absolutely no paper in the process of obtaining signatures. And while there is the argument of requiring power to run a computer or phone to handle eSignatures, and going even deeper the question of how these machines are manufactured, the scales are still heavily tipped in favor of going digital: The power required to send a single document is negligible, and over the lifetime of a computer, hundreds of thousands of documents can be sent – bringing the environmental cost of each document down way below the cost of cutting down trees to print on paper.
Taking care of the environment is everyone’s responsibility – individuals as well as businesses. Beyond this immediate satisfaction, reducing paper is also a significant step in “going green”, which sends a strong signal and can shed a positive light on the business from a publicity perspective.
The Bottom Line
Some facts are indisputable: More and more people are working from home – or anywhere, for that matter. As any business grows, coordination and especially in-person activities become exponentially more difficult to organize. New technologies make forging traditional signatures easier than ever, casting a shadow of doubt over the validity of any manually signed document. Last but not least, trees are vanishing at an alarming rate, forcing us to re-think our use of paper in order to preserve an environmental balance.
The traditional, paper-based signing process suffers from – or accelerates – all of the above. A simple step like moving to eSignatures can be the silver bullet required to make them all a thing of the past and truly allow your business to thrive in the years to come.