Since the financial crisis of 2008, the audit trail of a document that has been electronically signed has become a crucial component of an electronic signature system. Laws and regulations have tightened up since then. Audits of businesses are occurring more regularly. Senior leaders are increasingly held accountable for their choices on a legal and financial level. To demonstrate compliance when an auditor inevitably knocks, businesses are now striving to record as much information as possible about the decisions their leaders and workers make, as well as the transactions that occur with their customers and partners.
By enforcing business standards throughout the signing workflow and keeping track of what transpired when people were presented with papers for review and signature, an e-signature solution can assist an organization’s compliance. However, when it comes to their audit trail capabilities, not all electronic signature solutions are made equal.
Even though it can be difficult, the need to standardize processes and digitally manage many of these complicated areas using Document Management Systems has increased productivity and efficiency.
Businesses can now coordinate launch activities from many locations around the globe, which helps them sell new products in the US and other countries more swiftly and effectively.
Does the electronic signature solution reliably record and recreate the fundamental details of the signing workflow? Does it give you the ability to demonstrate who signed what documents, when (date and time stamp), where (city), how (computer/IP address), when it was done, and by whom?
Is the document’s content as well as the signatures secured by the electronic signature solution? Does it stop people from copying and pasting signatures into other documents or erasing them from the original document? Does it stop users from editing and removing the document’s content? If any changes are found, are signatures visibly invalidated?
Multiple participants are involved in many business procedures, and each signer must fill out their specific fields and add their signature. Each time a new signer uses the electronic signature solution, are the contents of the document also digitally signed? Is the audit trail updated if a signer and co-signer e-sign a contract on different dates?
You won’t have a complete picture of each signing event if the solution wraps a single digital signature around the entire document after the procedure. What would it mean for your company in terms of compliance or litigation if you can’t show that various persons signed at different times?
Does the electronic signature solution allow you to securely store and verify documents anywhere you wish by embedding the audit trail right into the papers? Or, must you return to the e-signature vendor’s service to confirm the legitimacy of the electronically signed document? How will it affect your business and operations if you have to use the e-signature vendor’s service to store and verify documents, especially if they have performance problems, service delays, or even fail to operate?
Are you able to review the events that occurred throughout the signing workflow using the electronic signature solution?
Does it record screenshots and timestamps of the entire process, including what users saw and every move they made from beginning to end? Does it allow you to demonstrate how documents were presented to users when they were generated dynamically and shown for review and signing within a web browser?
A top-notch DMS should allow for the production and management of numerous signing certificates, as well as the capability to restrict access to users if security has been breached.
DMS software that properly combines digital signatures is ideal for meeting FDA criteria for foreign companies entering the US market. However, this capability can assist any organization in bringing structure to convoluted approval processes and order to document chaos.
In a constantly changing digital environment, your company should find it simpler to demonstrate compliance with an electronic signature solution. This calls for more than just recording audit trail data at the document level. An electronic signature solution should also preserve an active audit trail of the process so that you can show precisely what signers experienced and consented to as more and more transactions take place online and documents are dynamically generated each time for each individual.