E-signing for US businesses.

Printing a contract, mailing it across the country and waiting a week for it to come back is a slow way to close anything. SignAndGo lets a US business send documents for signature, track the status of each one, and keep every finished copy with its audit trail, all from one place. It is part of MyAndGo, so the same login also opens ShareAndGo for secure data rooms and BookAndGo for online booking.

What changes when you stop printing

The paperwork itself stays the same. Your engagement letters, supplier terms, quotes, employment agreements and client forms are still your documents, in PDF or Word. SignAndGo does not supply wording, so nothing about what you ask people to agree to changes. What changes is the round trip. Instead of printing, scanning and chasing, you upload the file, mark where each person signs and send it. The other side opens a link and signs on whatever device is in their hand.

Because each envelope reports its own progress, nobody has to call around asking whether the form came back. You can see that the client in Phoenix opened it last night and the co-owner in Atlanta signed this morning.

The legal basis for electronic signatures

In the United States, the federal ESIGN Act and each state's electronic transactions law give electronic signatures and records the same legal effect as paper for most transactions. Most states have adopted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act; New York has its own Electronic Signatures and Records Act. Some documents are excluded, such as wills, codicils and testamentary trusts, divorce and adoption documents, court orders and certain official notices, such as foreclosure, eviction and insurance-cancellation notices. Check with your adviser which of your documents can be signed electronically.

The audit trail records each view and signature with the person's name, email address, the time and the IP address used.

The four parts of every envelope

Every job in SignAndGo follows the same shape, whatever the document is. Once you can picture these four parts, setting up any envelope is a matter of filling them in.

• Documents: one or several files travel together, so a contract and its schedules arrive as one pack.
• Fields: signature, initials, name, text, date, checkbox, Yes/No choice and file upload, each assigned to a person.
• People: signers, approvers and anyone copied in, in order or all at once.
• Record: status, an audit trail of views and signatures, a completion certificate and a verification ID.

A worked example: a boat build in Charleston

Picture a small Charleston boatbuilder agreeing on a new build with a customer in Richmond. Until now the contract went out by courier and came back three weeks later with a page missing. This is how the same job runs as one envelope. The business is invented for illustration.

• The office manager uploads three files into one envelope: the build contract, the specification and the stage payment schedule, all in the yard's own wording.
• She adds the yard manager as an approver before signing, so the specification is checked before the customer sees it.
• On the contract she places the customer's signature and date, initials on each page of the specification, a text field for the delivery marina and a Yes/No choice for whether the customer wants the optional trailer quoted.
• She chooses signers in order: the customer first, then the director, who countersigns last. The yard's bookkeeper is copied in.
• She writes a two-line message saying what the pack is and when the yard needs it back, and sends.
• The yard manager approves on his phone between jobs. The customer opens the link that evening, reads it on a tablet and signs. The director countersigns the next morning.
• Everyone, including the bookkeeper, receives the finished documents and the completion certificate. The envelope keeps the audit trail showing each view and signature.

When an envelope does not go to plan

Most envelopes finish without fuss, but it helps to know the usual snags before they happen.

• Nobody has opened it: check the email address on the envelope before you remind anyone. A typo is the commonest cause, and a fresh envelope to the right address fixes it.
• Opened but not signed: send a reminder with a short personal line, or set automatic reminders when you send.
• The customer wants a change: they can decline with a reason instead of signing. The envelope stops there and their note shows on it, so you can correct the document and send a fresh envelope.
• The document changes after you send: do not ask anyone to sign the old version. Send the corrected one as a new envelope and say in your message that it replaces the first.

Built for how small US teams work

Plenty of US businesses have a handful of people doing everything. Templates mean the person who sets up the onboarding pack once does not have to place the same fields again next month. A shared workspace means the office manager can see what the owner sent, and admins decide who can do what.

A typical first week

Start with the one document that causes the most chasing, often a client agreement or a new staff pack. Send it to a colleague first so you see the signer's side, then to a real client. By the end of the week, turn it into a template so the next send takes a minute, and invite whoever else in the office sends paperwork.