The Benefits of Using Electronic Signatures for Accounting

Accounting may be its own industry, but it plays an important role for businesses and individuals in practically every other industry. Taxes, financial planning, financial management and bookkeeping, payroll, and more are often managed by accounting professionals in order to promote healthy business growth, management, and compliance. This type of work take smart, structured, and knowledgeable approaches that are streamlined to promote optimal accuracy and efficiency. This is where electronic signatures come in.

Below, we’ll dive into the unique and practical benefits that electronic signatures provide those in accounting. Plus, we’ll give you an inside look at how Foxit eSign electronic signatures provide unique account solutions that are increasingly in demand.

When it comes to productivity streamlining and the benefits to every day processes, electronic signatures have a lot to offer accountants and accounting firms – here’s why:

• Faster Document Completion: When it comes to accounting, time is money. Accountants, especially in the tax field, live by deadlines. When deadlines aren’t, met they can mean costly penalties and fees. By utilizing electronic signatures, accounting professionals and firms are finding that they can obtain client completed documents faster than ever before, assuring that payments and forms can be handled on time.
• Enhanced Convenience: Accountants and their clients are busy – they last thing they want to deal with is messy paperwork filling their day. Fortunately, with electronic signatures, documents can be signed in just a few clicks from wherever the signer is, thus allowing an added element of convenience to be added to everyone’s day. 
• More Secure: Accounting documents often feature personal identifying information (PII) such as social security numbers, bank account numbers, and more. When traditional paper documents are used, there’s always an increased possibility it getting lost, stolen, or viewed by outside parties unintentionally. With digital documents, accountants can provide their clients with added security by ensuring limited and controlled visibility, secure password-controlled access, digital signatures, and more. 
• Industry Compliant: For those in the financial and accounting industries, meeting compliance and regulatory requirements is essential FINRA guidelines and IRS electronic form requirements can easily be met through knowledge-based authentication (KBA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) options provided through electronic signatures.
• Quicker Payment: Through the use of electronic signatures, accountants and their firms don’t have to wait for paper bills to be mailed, paid, and received. Simply email invoices for approval and payment or embed signing forms on your website for quick filling and payment submission.
• Better Team Collaboration: For those times that require multiple departments or persons to collaborate on an account or document, electronically signed accounting documents simplify and enhance the process by allowing emails to be sent and easily edited between team members. 
• Better Accuracy: Accuracy is essential in accounting. On one document, multiple parties may be required to sign, there may be multiple signing fields, and various information may need to be gathered. Electronic documents promote better accuracy than ever before by providing accounts the ability to guide signers through the signing process by marking where signatures are required and indicating where data needs to be provided. Additionally, when a change is required or a mistake has been made, document creators can simply make the change and re-send to signatories in a matter of minutes. 
• Increased Savings: Bottom line, digital documents and electronic signing are cheaper than paper and pen-and-ink signing. By switching to digital, accounting firms can substantially reduce their overhead and more adequately use their budgets to meet goals.

Foxit eSign was truly built with the specific needs of accountants and accounting firms of all sizes in mind. When you’re regularly handling sensitive and personal information and documentation, not just any signing solution will do – you need the right one that’s custom fit for your business. Here’s an inside look at what Foxit eSign offers:

• Use Secured Fields for Document Privacy: When private information needs to be collected, using secured fields through Foxit eSign can limit viewership by blocking out all or part of a field as needed; this can be especially helpful when it comes to things like social security numbers and bank account numbers. 
• Verify Identity and Meet Compliance Requirements With KBA: For those who perform accounting in the banking industry, or those who regularly submit IRS tax forms , the utilization of security elements like Foxit eSign’s KBA and MFA features is not only preferred but often required. Utilizing these functions through our electronic signature solution allows accountants to implement an integral step to further prove and establish the identity of signers.
• Establish Template Rules for Added Convenience: By establishing template rules in Foxit eSign, accounting users can automatically add fields from a template to any one-time document that matches the established keyword to further optimize and automate document processes.
• Build a Content Library for Faster Form Completion: Often in the accounting world the same forms are completed over and over again. Save commonly used forms in your firm’s own content library for faster document sending.
• Delegate Signatories for Clear Signing: In just a few clicks, you can delegate who signs what and where throughout any document; this saves a lot of time and headache for both signatories and accountants alike.
• Reduce Errors by Mandating Field Completion and Providing Instructions: When documents are long, or require a lot of data input (as is often the case with accounting-related documents) there is an increased chance of error or missing information. By utilizing electronic signatures and digital documents through Foxit eSign, accountants can significantly reduce error rates and time spent on error correction by adding in mandatory field completions and custom document instructions.
• Use File Replacement to Update Templates Quickly: Switching out or updating documents with the same fields has never been easier than with Foxit eSign! Simply use our template file replacement tool to update templates in seconds.
• Streamline Productivity by Integrating Signing Into the Apps You Use: How many procedures or processes do you and your team and clients complete on a daily basis through apps and software such as Gmail, Google Docs, SalesForce, and more? Foxit eSign makes it easy to implement signing into the app processes you already use. Use Zapier to set up integration workflows in a few clicks, utilize our pre-built native integrations, or take it a step further and fully integrate e-signing into your platforms and software with our custom API.
• Upload Practically Any File Format: We understand that everyone works differently and creates their forms and documents utilizing various file formats. Fortunately, when using Foxit eSign, you never have to worry about what format your document is in
• Automate Document Saving to Cloud Storage or SFTP Servers: It’s time to do away with the ancient file cabinets and switch to digital. Not only will electronic signatures simplify the signing process, but you can automate document saving and storage while you’re at it. Send your documents straight to your favorite cloud storage platform, like Google Docs, or save locally on your own SFTP servers.
• Control Viewership with User Permissions: Maintaining visibility control over documents is essential for accounting professionals. Foxit eSign makes visibility control easy with simplified tools for establishing user viewing permissions.