Service Review: Docusign Digital Contracts

For the first few years of my business I had been printing out contract and sending them out snail mail.

I’d be lucky if the entire process took a week, not to mention having to get to the post office to send out my licked envelopes and still send them a scanned copy once I got it back.

Then I discovered Docusign and swore off physical contracts forever.

What is Docusign?

For $120 per year you can send 5 digital envelopes (read, contracts) per month.

But are digital signatures binding? Here you go.

You can upload either a Word Doc or PDF, then add input fields, initial blocks, signature fields, and auto-populated dates.

For the amount of business I was doing at the time this was a godsend.

Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Relatively cheap ($120/yr)
• Stores contacts for use between recipient fields
• Can send a copy of your contract to as many emails you need
• Has a solid app to access contracts at any time
• Clients don’t need an account
• You get notified when clients are viewing your contract

Cons:

• Limited to 5 contracts per month
• Unable to edit errors within input fields (which wastes envelopes)
• Unable to bulk download contracts (must be done individually)
• Setting up templates suck; fields don’t line up sometimes
• No consistent dashboard showing # of used contracts that month

Verdict

It works, it’s cheap, but it can be very annoying when you have a busy month and have to wait to send out a contract to nail down that client.

There are CRM’s that include digital contracts in their cost with no monthly limitations (Ex. 17hats) so my advice is to shop around and find a more holistic solution. If you just need a few contracts a month right now in your business it will work, but realize you’re going to have to migrate to another service after you grow which can be a pain.