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4 Reasons For Businesses to Switch to eSignature: in Pixby@ulaholovko
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4 Reasons For Businesses to Switch to eSignature: in Pix

by Ula HolovkoApril 18th, 2018
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<span>C</span>ompared to tech trends such as AI, cryptocurrency, and VR, electronic signature doesn’t exactly look like a wonderment — rather a matter of course. But while conducting a beta testing of our eSigning app, <a href="https://www.keepsolid.com/sign/" target="_blank">KeepSolid Sign</a>, we were surprised to find out that 65% of the participants (including <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/business" target="_blank">business</a> owners and IT leaders) still print and manually sign their documents, despite all the drawbacks of this method.

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Compared to tech trends such as AI, cryptocurrency, and VR, electronic signature doesn’t exactly look like a wonderment — rather a matter of course. But while conducting a beta testing of our eSigning app, KeepSolid Sign, we were surprised to find out that 65% of the participants (including business owners and IT leaders) still print and manually sign their documents, despite all the drawbacks of this method.

History shows that businesses sticking to “good ol’ ways” and neglecting modern efficient technologies tend to quickly fall flat.

As an example, see the Kodak’s infamous decision to just sit on the newly-invented digital cameras out of fear that this technology would damage their business (which it did eventually, but for completely different reasons). So if you are among those who haven’t adopted electronic signature for their company yet, here are 4 reasons to do it right now so as not to miss the boat.

  1. Security and accessibility

In the sea, on the plain or even offline — anywhere, anytime, on any device.

When it comes to paper signatures, security is a huge concern. Your documents can be lost, damaged, forgotten, stolen, copied by third parties, they might get tea spilled on them, etc. These and many other potential issues are rendered impossible when using eSignature software. Most of the electronic signature providers offer highly secure AES-256 encryption protocol so that you can be sure that your files are safe and sound.

Additionally, it is very convenient that all your documents are synchronized between all your devices. You can immediately access them from your account anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

2. Long-distance and multi-party agreements

Sounds familiar? One of the situations in HR department

You’d probably be surprised how much a company’s productivity can suffer in the result of paperwork downtimes. This makes the ability to swiftly sign documents wherever the signee is located geographically one of the greatest benefits of e-signature software. It becomes so much easier to sign contracts that involve multiple parties. After the first person signs the document, the app automatically routes the file to the next signer in the workflow, so your business works faster than ever before.

3. Material and storage saving

Well, we exaggerated a bit, but paper is a fragile thing

Electronic signature technology allows your business to utilize your office space more efficiently by getting rid of massive and expensive office racks, shelves, and stacks of paper. E-signature software can also prevent your company from potential monetary losses caused by natural disasters, documents mishandling, and other accidents. Additionally, it is an eco-friendly technology that allows your company to reduce consumption of paper and other supplies related to printing.

4. Clear status of your documents

Moreover, you can even remind your participants about pending documents.

Have you ever found yourself wondering, “Have they signed it already?”, “What if they didn’t receive the documents at all?”, or “What if my contract was forgotten buried under some stack of paper?”. Document signing is a top-of-mind concern when your business’ future depends on it, yet can slip out of mind so easily when done on a constant basis.

This makes the document status tracking feature a great relief for users and a must for any eSignature service. Thanks to it, you can clearly see what stage of the signing process each document is at. And if time presses, you can just send a reminder to all or certain participants. With this handy feature, guesswork like “What’s taking them so long?” will remain in the past for you.

If all the reasons above were not convincing enough, just consider the following facts:

  • Businesses all over Europe are wasting almost an entire work day (6.8 hours) a week doing paperwork.
  • 65,395,000,000 sheets of paper are used in the U.S. daily. How much is that? This amount of paper costs as much as 6 exact copies of the Empire State Building would, outweighs 2.5 million sumo wrestlers, and requires almost 815,000 pine trees to be produced.
  • The typical executive wastes 150 hours a year (almost an entire month), searching for lost information. For someone earning $50,000 a year, this loss is equivalent to $3,842 annually.
  • Approximately 49% of finance employees’ time is spent processing transactions.

Are you in favor or against electronic document management?