You will save a lot of time and nerves by using a digital signature. But an electronic signature can also have significant economic implications for your business. Take a look what the numbers look like in practice.

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Electronic signature saves

In this article, we have calculated the savings for a small to medium-sized company that has introduced an electronic signature to speed up its signing processes, whether documents (contracts, invoices) should be signed internally or externally, by clients or suppliers.

For this purpose we compared the cost of obtaining the signature of 300 documents per month using the traditional method (sending documents for signature on paper) with the cost of using an electronic signature solution with Signosoft’s standard price list.

Suppose we want to send 300 documents with two pages and we have to get the signature of our client on both pages. We roughly calculated the cost of obtaining these documents signed using the traditional signature method and compared the results with the cost of obtaining these two signatures through an electronic signature solution such as the one we offer at Signosoft.

The cost of the traditional method

Material cost

  • Paper
    300 2-page documents
    make a total of 600 pages. A package of 500 sheets (A4, 80 g/m2) costs 108 CZK, so one sheet costs 0.22 CZK. The paper for our documents will therefore cost 132 CZK.
  • Toner
    Black toner with an expected life of 1,500 pages costs 1,971 CZK. Printing 600 pages costs 789 CZK.

Administration fees

  • Sending a document for signature
    If the time required to send a document is approximately 3 minutes – preparing a document and printing it for sending by mail – the total time an employee spends preparing 300 documents is 5 hours. And if this person charges 250 CZK per hour, the cost of performing this task is 3,750 CZK. We assume that the post office leaves the company en masse, so we do not count the way to the post office and waiting in line :-).
  • Acceptance of a signed document
    Once signed documents are received back, they usually need to be scanned and saved in both digital and paper format. Assuming that the time to manage each document is 5 minutes, the time required to process them will be 8.5 hours. At 250 CZK per hour, the cost of managing signed invoices would be 6,375 CZK.

Transport cost

Assuming that each invoice should be sent to the offices of another client in the same country, in our example in the Czech Republic:

Ordinary writing sent by the Czech Post costs 26 CZK (standard 50gr.). Sending 300 letters thus costs 7,800 CZK and together with the cost of envelopes a total of 8,200 CZK.

In the case of sending registered letters for the price of 59 CZK, the price will climb to 18,120 CZK.

Total cost

If the invoices are sent to the destination by regular mail, the total price of this manual process will be 19,266 CZK.

If it were decided to send invoices by registered mail, the total price would reach up to 29,166 CZK.

The cost of the digital method

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Material cost

They are zero. Documents are prepared, sent and returned digitally signed.

Document subscription costs

In our hypothetical case, if the company sent 300 documents per month for signing, the price would be 20 CZK per document. In total, 5,990 CZK per month.

Administration fees

  • Sending a document for signature
    Assume that sending a document for signing takes an average of 5 minutes: creating a document in Word, uploading it to Signosoft, editing the necessary fields, including the signature field, and sending it to the client for signing directly from the application. Given that the person responsible for carrying out this administration is part of the company’s administrative staff and charges 250 CZK per hour, the preparation of 300 documents would cost 6,375 CZK in this case.
  • Acceptance of a signed document
    Once each customer signs the document, the signature is automatically copied to the Signosoft application, from where it can be downloaded if necessary. There is no need to invest time in managing documents in digital format, because they are already archived in the Signosoft platform and you can access them from anywhere 24/7.

Transport cost

None exist because the documents are sent for signature directly from Signosoft.

Total cost

If a package with a limit of 300 documents was used, the total cost of sending 300 invoices would be 10,249 CZK, which is up to 57.6% less than in the case of preparing paper invoices and sending them to recipients by registered mail.

Traditional methodSignosoftDifference (in %)
Material cost921 CZK0 CZK– 100 %
Administration fees10 125 CZK6 375 CZK– 37 %
Transport8 220 Kč / 18 120 CZK0 CZK– 100 %
Subscription0 CZK5 990 CZK100 %
Total19 266 CZK / 29 166 CZK12 365 CZK– 35,8 % / – 57,6 %
Total (month/year)up to 16 801 CZK monthly
up to 201 612 CZK yearly

Signosoft clients

In the above calculations, we came to the price 64, or 97.2 CZK (registered letter) for 1 document vs. 41.2 CZK when using the Signosoft application.

Our clients sign an average of 20,000 documents per week in the application. Thanks to this, it will save up to 1,120,000 CZK per week (1,280,000 / 1,944,000 CZK vs. 824,000 CZK).

During the operation of Signosoft, users of the application have already electronically signed 10,000,000 documents. Our customers thus saved up to 560 million CZK (640 million / 972 million CZK vs. 412 million CZK).

Other benefits

In addition to the obvious cost savings associated with using an electronic signature to sign documents, we should also take into account that the digital process has other advantages over the traditional method of signing documents on paper:

  • It reduces the time required to obtain signed documents: it takes an average 37 minutes to receive a signed document with an electronic signature. In the traditional way, the process can take up to 5 days or more.
    
  • It is easier to follow the signing process and send reminders to the signatories.
    
  • The signer makes it easier to sign because it also saves paper and reduces his own administration costs.
    
  • It reduces the risk of lost documents because they are all sent for signature in digital format. This limits the risk of losing business opportunities due to the lack of timely signed documents.

Do you want to try signing electronically with the Signosoft application and save a lot of time and money? Register for free or contact us directly and join our star set of clients.

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Work should be about the decisions you make, not about the unnecessary paperwork. 

SIGNOSOFT S.R.O.

Za Poříčskou bránou 4/334
186 00 Praha 8
Czech Republic

ID: 243 07 190
Email: esign@signosoft.com
Phone: +420 224 311 176