Do the maths on business agreements and add up the savings of going digital

How much does your business spend on preparing, signing and managing business contracts? Tallying up all the costs – from labour to printer ink to (gasp!) postage stamps – can be tricky. And if you don’t know how much it costs you now, it can be hard to work out how much better off you’d be if you changed things.

For example, did you know that for every $1 of printing costs, there are typically $6 of follow-on costs for things like storage, misfiling, lost documents and postage. 

Figures like these come from Forrester Consulting’s “The Total Economic Impact of DocuSign” report. They paint a pretty clear picture of just how much money some businesses are spending on their agreements – particularly those still stuck with antiquated pen-and-paper contracts.

It’s not just the cost of managing agreements manually, either. Mistakes are common, which have costly implications down the track. 

For example, one large Australian food and beverage company is quoted in the research as saying, “A lot of people involved are at the senior leadership level, so being able to do things more quickly is significant. It’s quicker to send a virtual agreement to a senior leader, taking them directly to the sign page and initial boxes with a few taps rather than scheduling time, flipping through pages, finding the sign tabs, and then hoping that no tabs are missed. And we missed quite a bit, maybe one-in-four or one-in-five.”

Those missed signatures take time to follow up on – which busy leaders often can’t afford to give up.

Switching to digital clearly saves

The Forrester research presents a compelling case for switching to a digital agreement platform like DocuSign. Forrester interviewed two Australian companies who had previously relied on a largely manual contract signature process. In switching to DocuSign, they reaped significant benefits like:

• 1.35 hours of gained productivity per internal transaction
• 90% improvement in documents returned in good order
• $14.21 saving per transaction in printing and follow-on costs

As the Chief CX officer at a large Australian real estate company said, “The reduction in workflow steps and improvement in NIGO [not-in-good-order] gave time back to our sales teams. Because of this, we can easily avoid three to four FTEs in contract processing roles as we scale.”

In fact, the research points to a payback of less than six months when switching to DocuSign, with an average ROI of 122%. Ker-ching.

Bring your agreements into 2021 

If the cost and effort of managing agreements is getting you down, then it’s time to shake things up. Managing agreements 2021-style is fast, cost-effective and far less prone to error – with the automated agreement process doing the job of making sure that all the right people sign in all the right places, each and every time. 

To help you build your business case for going digital, we’ve built a calculator based on the Forrester research. You’ll need to do some quick estimates in terms of the number and length of agreements, the amount of postage involved, and the time it takes for your admin team to follow it all up. But even with some rough estimates, you’ll quickly see just how much you could save by switching to DocuSign. 

Have a play with our DocuSign ROI calculator today to see what you could save.