For many small businesses, digital transformation has been a cloud hanging over their heads – where to start, what cost will be involved, how will the business adjust? But instead of being weighed down, small business owners should look to the sky for inspiration.
You can’t see it or feel it, but cloud-based technology is an agile way to access all the benefits of emerging technologies and transform the way you do business, without the burden of servers and manual upgrades.
Cloud technology means you can have one source of truth accessible by as many people as you permit, from anywhere, anytime. Put simply, it makes doing business easier and faster, unlocking time and money that every small business owner needs.
A business function that is being transformed with cloud technology is agreements.
Businesses run on agreements, whether they be for employment, sales, or confidentiality.
They’re as diverse as businesses themselves. Some of the steps you may have included in your business agreements are:
- ID verification
- consent for terms and conditions
- signatures and more.
But the agreement itself does not end the agreement lifecycle. Stemming from these components may be a series of workflow actions such as collecting payment. Following this you will need to store the agreement for future recall.
If you take a close look at your system of agreement, you’re likely to find that there are many parts of this process that you have not brought online, are actioned independently to the steps before and after, are not as efficient as they could be and are not only slowing the business down, but costing it money.
For example, perhaps you create your documents online, but then you print them to gather signatures, then scan them, file them electronically and then manually enter the details in other systems to action the resulting workflow.
The process of printing alone costs money before you have invested more money and time in getting the agreement to the other party and chasing them for a signature; then manually entering details after the agreement is signed off doubles your workload.
By moving all the components of your business agreements to the cloud you can create a simplified experience, with less risk of human error and document tampering, lower cost, greater visibility of the steps from start to completion, while being able to conduct the transaction from anywhere, anytime.
Improving the process by moving to a cloud-based solution, such as DocuSign Agreement Cloud, can boost your bottom line and unlock time to reinvest in business growth.
Research* shows businesses who modernise their agreement process in this way improve their efficiency by 90 per cent, including their ‘not in good order’ rate for agreements, and eliminate costs previously incurred in the process of completing an agreement from start to finish.
Your customers, suppliers and employees will also feel the benefits – and we all know happy teams and customers are key to a successful business.
In today’s busy world, a solution that enables you to automate, connect, accelerate and simplify your entire agreement process is a boost no small business can do without.
Tom Hyde, Head of Sales – SMB, DocuSign APAC
