There are several applications out there in the market offering multiple documentation signing features for intent and context of sharing documents.
eSign
It is a way of legally binding a document between parties and businesses.
Acceptance
This feature is useful when there is no need of an electronic signature for legal matters but only the consent is must from the recipients side for closure.
Sometimes this feature can be used as alternative to eSignature.
Approval
Some official documents are needed to be verified from internal teams of the company before sharing the document with the outsider person or third party.
The approval feature makes the signing process more efficient for the users.
This blog talks about how an electronic signature can be automated using document management system. Moreover, it also displays the relevance and features of the cloud-based document management system.
What is an Electronic Signature?
A digital signature or eSignature is a way of legally signing a document to process official operations or processes.
It is marked as a more efficient alternative to hand-written signatures. As defined by the US Federal ESIGN Act of 2000; an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and performed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.
As the present time has pushed multiple businesses from all over the world to work and connect with each other remotely, eSignatures are paving their ways to authenticate document signing digitally in highly secured environment.
In the early 2018, the eSignature app development market was worth $2.28b and is expected to grow with an approximate CAGR of 33.47% to reach a worth of $17.20 Billion.
eSignatures are considered to be a legal way of signing documents and enhances the businesses processes.
Which Documents Need Electronic Signatures?
eSignature application is used by businesses for signing documents that are needed to be marked with legal bindings.
Some of the examples of those documents are:
- Non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
- Non-compete agreement
- Commercial lease agreement
- Sales agreement
- Shareholders agreement
- Founders agreement
- Master service agreement
Why Traditional or Wet Signatures Have Now Become a Thing of Past?
A wet signature is a traditional way of signing documents where a person used to physical sign the document with a pen or a seal.
As the businesses are evolving with digital transformation, wet signatures are no longer considered and fits with this rapidly evolving world. Below are some of the challenges with the wet signatures:
Demands Physical Presence
Wet signatures require the physical presence of the signing authority for exchanging of the documents. The unavailability results in either delays or halts of the overall process.
Cumbersome Process
This process is lengthy and time wasting as it requires the user to go through a lengthy process of download-print-sign-scan-upload and send documents.
This troubles gets doubled when there is the need to share the documents in multiple print copies. Sometimes the physical documents get lost during the transit and it becomes difficult to track down these lost documents.
Prone to Forgery
As a hand signature is marked on a physical paper, it is not tamper-proof and can be easily altered.
Security Risks
Paper documents are not much secure as they can be easily stolen or lost. As there are no digital tracking choices, sometimes it becomes difficult to track down the lost documents.
Storage Issues
Physical or paper documents require a large storing space. As a result, organizations always have to look for expanding their storage area for storing the pile of their business documents.
Inefficient
Let us suppose a situation where a document has various pages that needs to be signed by various authorities of the department.
Much time will be wasted as the document will be shared and signed by all the authorities. This stall process can sometimes bring loss for businesses.
Huge Financial Investment
Signing documents are considered as an important aspects of business success and development. Every day, millions of documents are shared for various business purposes, within and outside the organisation.
This results in high demand of monetary investments for papers, inks, copies, printing, and document dispatching.
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Detrimental to the Environment
Paper dependent organisations are increasing the carbon footprint in many ways. As the demand for paper will increase, more trees will be cut down, more factories will be required for manufacturing with more vehicles for transportation.
This is directly becoming fatal for planet Earth.
In simple terms, wet or traditional signatures are outdated, tedious, and sometimes delays the progress of organisation.
What is an Automated Document Management System?
An automated document management software is a web based tool that is used to manage and monitor the electronic documents.
It allows the users to edit, create, monitor, store, and share documents with other party members online. The tool offers multiple advanced features such as version control, app management & integration, etc. to help organisations for better management of records.
In short, management of digital documents becomes easy and simple with the help of digital document management software. With this tool, organisations can automate their business workflows and tasks for removing errors and dependencies.
But how?
As it allows the users to create and set a fixed path for the documents, the internal and external tasks of the businesses are streamlined for quick and error-free results.
What are the Features of a Document Management System?
Every organisation is different so their needs from document management system. Here are some of the most common set of features:
Professionally Vetted Templates
As companies process multiple documents every day, creating a document from scratch usually consumes the time of the organisation.
With the document management system, the companies have access to pre-built document templates. Users can easily customize those templates as per their needs which results in saving a lot of time and resources for the company.
Electronic Signature
The document management software has in built feature of eSignature to offer the speed for improving business processes.
Meaningful Integrations
The miscommunication and lack of information results in muddled business processes. Through a document management system, businesses can eliminate risks, reduce management costs, and process huge volumes of information easily.
eSignly can be easily integrated with other business platforms such as Google Drive, Slack, Zapier, Zoho, and various other, resulting in accelerating business workflow.
Effective Collaboration
The in-built collaboration tools of document management systems allow the users to process work tasks on a single platform.
Users can also record the work interactions of the documents through chats and notes for reference. These features of document management systems help in quicker decision making.
Automated Workflows
The document management system tools also reduce the chances of inefficiencies of business processes. As the users will have a clear set of workflow tasks, they will get better output and result.
Cloud Storage
As document management systems are a web based applications, it offers a cloud storage to users. So they do not have to worry about the security of their data.
Incredibly Faster and Efficient
As the world has been transforming into a digital sector, traditional and old of ways of paper-driven document management processes are not considered as a suitable fit for this era.
A single eSignature application eSignly offers various features to users such as document drafting, send eSignature, store documents, and integration with various other native APIs.
Easy Access and Convenience
With digital signature software, the users do not have be present physically for signing the documents. eSignly offers a mobile-app enabled document management system to users, so that they can sign the document from anywhere and anytime as per their convenience and device.
Enhanced Security
eSignly protects the documents and data of users with top-quality security patches and technology to ensure that the document is not accessed by any outsider or third party.
User Management
Unrestricted access to the documents results in confusion and you may miss updates or revisions in the document.
Moreover, you will have no idea who made the changes in the document. But with eSignly digital signature software, you can define roles for each user and they have access to the documents as per their roles.
This helps in eliminating the chances of unwanted changes in a document.
Eco-Friendly
Adopting digital ways for signing documents can eliminate the wastage of papers. This results in saving trees, reducing carbon footprint, and protecting the environment.
What are the three Benefits of a Document Management System?
The document management systems help companies by enhancing the document related tasks for various business processes.
This also optimizes the operations to bring consistency and confidentiality in the documents produced by the companies. Here are some ways in which document management systems can be beneficial for your company:
Synchronized Way of Functioning
If businesses rely on paper documents, they need a lot of time to search for the right paper and share it with the other authorities.
But the document management systems can reduce this workload by allowing easier access to documents, resulting in high transparency for business functioning.
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Enhances Security of Sensitive Documents
Security of documents and data is the most important thing that businesses need to consider at first. But manual or paper documents increases the chances of loopholes.
Through a document management system, companies can have better control on their data and organizations documents.
Saves Time and Resources
Business always have various ways to cut down the extra resources and costs with latest and advanced innovations to automate the repetitive and manual business tasks.
And a document management system is one such innovations that helps the organizations to save time, money, and human resources by automating the business management workflows.
