Five reasons to take signing off paper.

Most businesses have been trying to go paperless for years, and signing is where paper hangs on longest. Contracts, consent forms and approvals are still printed, signed by hand, scanned and emailed in offices every day. Electronic signing removes that loop, and the gains go well beyond convenience.

1. Speed: days become minutes

Paper signing is slow by design. Printing, posting, waiting, receiving, scanning and filing each add a delay, and every delay is a chance for a deal to stall.

With electronic signing, the sender uploads the document, places the fields and sends it. The recipient gets an email, opens the link, signs in their browser and is done. Nothing to print, post or scan.

For businesses that send in volume, such as recruiters issuing contracts, property managers handling leases or consultancies onboarding clients, the saving adds up quickly. A back and forth that once took a week can be finished before lunch.

2. Cost: more than paper and ink

The direct costs of paper signing are easy to see: paper, ink, envelopes, postage and couriers. The indirect costs are usually bigger.

• Staff time to prepare, print and send the document.
• The recipient's time to print, sign, scan and return it.
• Your time to receive it, check it and file the signed copy.
• Physical storage, from filing cabinets to retrieving old files.
• The cost of a deal held up by days of waiting for the post.

3. Less waste

Taking paper out of signing removes the printing, the envelopes and the courier trips that go with it. Many organizations now report their move away from paper as part of their sustainability reporting, and clients and partners increasingly notice it. It is one of the easiest visible wins available.

4. Security: paper is the weak link

Paper documents get lost in the post, left on desks, read by the wrong people, altered without anyone noticing, damaged by water or fire, and misfiled for good.

Electronic signing addresses each of these. Each signer receives their own link tied to their email address, a completed document is sealed so that later changes can be detected, and the audit trail records who opened and signed the document and when. For anyone handling financial details, personal information or confidential terms, that is a real step up.

5. Records you can find

When an auditor, insurer or lawyer asks for a signed document, how long does it take to find it? With paper, the honest answer is often that it depends on who filed it and where.

With electronic signing, every completed document is kept with its audit trail and completion certificate, and you can find it from your dashboard in seconds. That matters for audits, insurance claims, employment questions and contract negotiations alike.

A practical way to start

1. Pick your highest-volume documents. Client agreements, employment paperwork and NDAs are common starting points.
2. Turn them into templates. Save the documents, fields and a role for each signer once, so each send takes seconds.
3. Show your team. A short walkthrough of sending a document is usually all it takes.
4. Tell your clients and partners. Most welcome it, because nobody enjoys printing and scanning.
5. Measure the change. Track how many documents you send and how quickly they come back.