Even after the shift from paper to computer, one thing hasnt lost its importance, the signature. Whether its a hand written signature or typed on a smartphone, signatures are considered as the sign of bonding.
Use of digital signature solutionshas been on rise but how much idea you have about them? Do you know when you should use them or are they legal or not. Do the electronic signature company keep your data safe?
As per a survey by canon, around 28% of SMBs still spend too much time on administrative paperwork. Another survey from YouGov revealed that SMBs are losing around 8.72 billion every year just by spending resources and time on administrative paperwork.
However, choosing an electronic signature for your business is still a tough nut to crack.
7 Things to Consider in an Electronic Application
The desire to cut costs and go paperless. Electronic signatures are paving their ways to be an important part of businesses.
Reports from Legalesign revealed that more and more users from varied industry sectors such as sales, accounting, healthcare, and recruitment have already realised that choosing a digital signature doesnt only depend on price.
The major challenge is to choose and application that can deliver desired results with cost savingsand in short term, while being responsive as well as responsible to you for a long term plan.
Here are 7 things that you should consider while choosing an electronic signature application to achieve all your business goals.
Does your eSignature app work as you are, and as things might be?
Every business is different and they have different ways of doing things, and that changes with time too. As business needs and requirements also changes with each passing day and they surely do not want to change their service provider consistently.
So look for an eSignature application that can work with you for a longer run and cover every situation of your business. Does it offer features for both approvers as well as signers? Can you change brand easily to apply various signing strategies for your signers? The eSignature apps you are planning to choose must handle all your business processes and situations as per your needs and expectations.
Ease of use
While choosing an eSignature application, at first you should look for ease of use as forefront. The last thing that your business should consider is choosing an application that would take hours of your staff to learn how to use it.
For well settled organisations and multinational enterprises, a complex eSign application results in loss of thousands of hours and hidden costs. A seamless eSign app streamlines the business work processes as well as enables the new employees to get trained within few minutes.
Wider Features
While choosing an eSign application, look for the features offered by the application to your business with some extra benefits.
For example, what are the reminder schedules and how can you change them easily. Does it also support multiple time zones as per the location of signers? Sending notifications related to expiry dates of signature is also a feature that should be considered while choosing an eSign application.
Security
Wet ink signing or physical signing is highly legal and confidential and signing a document through eSignature application should not be different.
Most of the companies use eSignature applications for extra security. Certified PDF created with eSign applications will offers a timestamp attached with the signed documents. But before choosing an eSignature application, you must ensure that it keeps your data safe and secure from data breaching.
Certification such as ISO27001 will assure that the application can protect your business data. Moreover, the application you are choosing must align with the GDPR rules and regulations. With GDPR you are not only assured that your data is safe but it also saves you from potential fines from ICO.
Cost-effective
The chances that you are planning to go with an eSignature application is, you want to streamline your business process as well as save some money and resources.
You should be aware that you are not spending out of your budget on the eSignature application. Before investing in an eSignature application, compare plans of various apps, see reviews as well as the features. Most of the eSign apps offer packages with different feature-sets, some of which are not even listed on their website.
Try to go with free trial option to have an idea about the working and features of the application. Choosing a cost effective software doesnt means going with a cheap option, but a combination of some features that suits best with your business.
Scalability
As a business owner, you always want your business to move forward and stay ahead of your competitors, so you need a tool that can work with you for a longer run.
Same thing is with the eSign apps;you must ensure that the application helps you to grow your business in right direction. One goof way to know about it by looking at the packages offered by the digital signature application; how many users can be added, how the app manages multiple teams or departments, keeping in mind some other concerns such as GDPR and access security.
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Support
You will not think about support until you are stuck while using the application. So you need to ensure that the eSign application offers you consistent support in case of any issues or problems.
The contracts that you are sending needs signature as well as returning and as a business owner you should not be sitting and waiting to get a reply from the support team. A good way to know about the support team is you can check the reviews from other users that are using the eSignature application.
Conclusion
Based on your business, you have to look at various factors before choosing an eSignature application. For example, if your firm works with filing tax returns, then you should go with an app that is IRS-compliant.
Looking at all the above mentioned features before choosing an eSign application will help you to go with the best eSignature solution that will improve your business productivity as well as streamline the business processes.
