As millions of senders and signers have discovered, DocuSign’s Electronic Signature Service saves its users a significant amount of time. The more signatures you need, the more time you can potentially save by using electronic signature instead of print-sign-copy-scan-fax or sending documents for overnight delivery.

1. Just Use It! DocuSign can only save you time if you use it. If you’re on the fence about trying it, DocuSign Lite is one way to try electronic signature. It’s free and you can use it from LOOP to PDF, iGoogle gadget, Mozilla Firefox plug-in, or the DocuSign home page. If you’re ready for more features, you can sign up for DocuSign – there’s a 30 day free trial, so you can try the more robust features, receive the DocuSign Certificate of Signing and all the other benefits at no risk to you.

2. Take advantage of workflow. Workflow rules are one of the greatest time saving benefits of DocuSign. For example, if you need to get your clients’ signatures before sending the documents on to the other agent, your process looks like this:

  1. Upload documents to DocuSign.
  2. Tag the documents for signatures and initials with stick-e-tabs, which ensure that no signatures or initials will be missing.
  3. Use Sequential Signing to make sure that your clients eSign in the order you want them to eSign in.
  4. CC the other agent on the transaction so that he or she will automatically get the signed and completed documents once your clients have all signed.

If you were using a non-eSign process, your process might look like this:

  1. Email the documents to your clients.
  2. Your clients have to print and sign the documents.
  3. Your clients have to fax the documents back to you.
  4. You wait for the documents until they come through the fax machine.
  5. You double check to make sure all the signatures and initials are there. If any are missing, you contact your client to get the signatures or initials.
  6. You wait for those pages to come back.
  7. You scan the signed documents or make copies for your files.
  8. You fax the papers to the other agent in the transaction to move the deal along.

With DocuSign’s workflow capabilities, you don’t have to wait near a fax machine. You can set up DocuSign to notify your clients to eSign in the order you want them signed and once your clients have signed, DocuSign will even get the documents to the other agent in the transaction, so you don’t have to!

3. Upgrade from DocuSign Professional Standard to DocuSign Professional Advanced. If you tend to create a lot of the same types of documents for your clients to sign, an upgrade to the advanced version can cut your document creation time down to as little as two minutes.

Why? DocuSign Professional Advanced has additional functionality such as templates and Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) which enables you to save pretagged documents so you don’t have to place the stick-e-tabs every single time you create a set of documents for your clients.

IDR simplifies it further by learning the documents you use and applying pre-defined custom document workflows, signature and initial locations to your contracts, even if they are complex, multipart contracts. This is based on your document signing workflow and business rules.

If you’re ready to save some serious time, I encourage you to check out DocuSign. If you’ve been using DocuSign, what are some time saving tips you’ve discovered? Please do share them with us in the comments!

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