By Pem Guerry

St. Patrick’s Day is synonymous with all things green. Even e-signatures can fit right into this celebration because of the money businesses save when they adopt e-signatures.

Yes, e-signatures hold a powerful ability to improve a company’s bottom line. Namely, e-signature software saves businesses money in these three ways:

Paper and related supplies.

  1. There’s a reason the paperless office movement is moving full-speed ahead—paper processes can bleed a budget dry. Companies have to pay for paper reams; envelopes; inks and toners for printers, copiers and fax machines; stamps and shipping costs; and courier services, to name a few. Done a few hundred or thousand times over, it gets very expensive. E-signatures keep transactions moving in the cloud and never need to be printed, meaning your paper-related supplies can stretch a lot farther.
  2. After documents are signed on paper, they continue to be a financial burden. For businesses in high-volume transaction industries—like real estate, financial services, healthcare, banking, etc.—files are often stored by third parties for several years. Even for documents physically stored on-site, you typically need to shell out money for new filing boxes or cabinets and shredding services. E-signatures keep your documents digital from start to finish, eliminating physical file storage costs.
  3. The physical effort behind a paper document’s signature may not be as obvious as a crew doing construction, but like supplies and storage, it adds up over time and costs money. Employees spend time coordinating document signing; scanning, faxing and mailing documents; meeting signers in person; filing papers; opening envelopes; fixing errors; and more. This often takes time away from mission-critical tasks. E-signatures reduce the time it takes to process signed documents: They let people sign documents wherever they are and on any device, and they can alert users if documents are not in good order.

Just how much money can e-signatures save you?

While faxing, basic shipping, printing and scanning may cost just a few pennies per transaction, they multiply quickly. Let’s take, for example, the paper load behind a typical 20-person company. On average, it:

  • Signs 600 documents a month, which are about two pages (This is a conservative estimate, assuming each employee needs about one document signed each day.)
  • Mails (basic service) about 30 documents a month. (5% of all documents that require a signature)
  • Overnights about 12 (2% of all documents)
  • Two-day ships about 12 (2% of all documents)
  • Faxes 60 (10% of all documents)
  • Scans 300 (50% of all documents)
  • Physically files 300 (50% of all documents)

With e-signatures, this company would likely save more than $12,000 annually on paper-related costs.

The best is yet to come.

Not only will you be able to save money, you can invest those savings into other projects that support your business’ goals. In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, that’s a true pot of gold.

Pem Guerry is the Executive Vice President at SIGNiX, an Independent E-Signature™ solutions provider that makes signing documents online safe, secure and legal for any business. SIGNiX offers an independently verifiable cloud-based digital signature solution, which combines workflow convenience with superior security. Learn more about what makes SIGNiX different at www.signix.com.