Navigating paperwork in the realm of banking, finance, and accounting often involves repetitive work, and it can feel especially tedious when processing sensitive data that requires stringent security measures. The traditional approach to financial paperwork leaves room for risks: forging, data loss or manipulation, missed deadlines, untraceable transactions, data entry oversights, and privacy violations. Fortunately, there's a way to eliminate these challenges. By digitizing your paperwork with an automated and secure signature workflow, you can avoid risks and safeguard your processes.
Zoho Sign is a robust digital signature platform that can simplify your financial paperwork lifecycle with end-to-end contract management. With features like payment collection integrations, formula fields, templates, witness signing, and legal compliance with e-signature laws worldwide, Zoho Sign is the ideal choice for streamlining your financial paperwork lifecycle.
What is financial contract lifecycle management?
Financial contract lifecycle management (CLM) is the process of seamlessly handling an organization's financial paperwork, from agreement authorship to renewal and beyond. Finance teams frequently deal with high volumes of confidential customer data. This requires meticulous, error-free documentation and signed approvals at every stage. Transforming financial contract workflows with a comprehensive digital signature application like Zoho Sign guarantees a one-stop solution for all your paperwork. It offers secure and tamper-proof signing, integrated payment collection, branding customizations, automatic backup of signed documents, traceable audit trails, and centralized document management.
What does a financial contract lifecycle look like?
Typically, the agreement lifecycle in the finance vertical looks something like this:
- The finance team authors various contracts.
- A team representative sends a non-disclosure agreement to a customer.
- The customer returns it signed. Any approval signatures are added.
- The representative sends an estimate to the customer.
- All parties sign the estimate.
- The representative signs and sends an invoice.
- The customer signs and returns the invoice.
- A finance team member records the transactions in a journal.
- The data recorder signs the ledger and balance sheet.
- Approvers review and sign the balance sheet.
- The signed documents are securely stored.
Challenges in manual financial contracts management
The traditional method for managing financial contracts is tedious and opens the organization to many risks. Agreements in a financial contract lifecycle often go through multiple revisions that are signed by many parties. Moreover, as the organization scales, financial documents accumulate and become repetitive to draft, edit, circulate, and execute. Standardizing the financial contract lifecycle in accordance with strict security and privacy regulations is also difficult to manage without a modern system. Some common challenges that companies face while physically managing financial agreements are:
Error-prone documentation
Finance contracts have complex data that make manual drafting prone to errors. Meticulous drafting, reviewing, and revisions are required, especially when dealing with larger volumes of documents. However, errors can arise even while collecting payments and signatures. Customers may accidentally commit errors that make it necessary to restart the entire financial contract lifecycle. Or worse, such errors could go unnoticed and cause future issues with customer relationships.
Failing to meet industry standards
There are numerous legal standards around the world for how financial documentation must be drafted, presented, and maintained. As other businesses rapidly transition to digital paperwork, the use of traditional CLM methods may lead the company to fail behind industry standards. This can tarnish its reputation and reliability and encourage customers to look for better alternatives.
Redudant and inefficient contract lifecycle
Recurring financial contracts tend to be time-consuming and expensive for organizations. When organizations scale, the challenges increase, leading to inefficient and unorganized paperwork management. Digitizing financial paperwork with platforms like Zoho Sign boosts organizational productivity while saving both time and money.
Lack of centralized management
Financial paperwork goes through many stakeholders and could become disorganized along the way. Having a linear process, centralized access, and orderly storage of all financial contracts can be challenging without a digital system. This also makes it hard to retrieve and audit documents.
Lack of traceability and transparency
Without centralized access, controls, and management, tracing paperwork to the right stakeholders becomes difficult. Documents cannot be reliably verified, and in turn, it is hard to place accountability with a lack of transparency in the financial contract lifecycle. Moreover, keeping up with deadlines and audits becomes an arduous task in the absence of real-time status tracking.
Increased turnaround time and lack of security
Physically drafting, editing, and mailing estimates, invoices, bills, and balance sheets for signatures takes long hours of work. Plus, financial paperwork is exposed to endless risks like signature or contract forgery, document tampering, data loss, and mishandled deliveries when done manually. Switching to digital paperwork platforms like Zoho Sign speeds up the financial contract lifecycle by more than 80% and reduces risks of forgery and tampering to almost none.
Disorganized collaboration
Manually coordinating the flow of financial paperwork between departments can lead to haphazard collaboration, increased errors, and confusion. Platforms like Zoho Sign automate signature workflows with little to no manual interference, ensuring frictionless and accurate results. It also integrates with a range of CRM and finance applications, which helps with faster finance contract lifecycle automation.
Here's how Zoho Sign boosts your financial CLM
Reduce security threats
With Zoho Sign, your financial contract lifecycle is bolstered with top-grade, end-to-end security. It uses AES-256 encryption when documents are at rest and the TSL/SSL protocol when in transit. Each document signed with Zoho Sign has a unique digital signature certificate attached it to guarantee non-repudiable and sabotage-free signing.
Comply with international regulations and industry standards
Zoho Sign is a one-stop solution for stress-free financial paperwork, as it aligns with strict security and data privacy guidelines, such as the GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, and many more. Zoho Sign further helps organizations in the life sciences and healthcare industry comply with standards like 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11. Documents signed with Zoho Sign are legally binding across the globe, abiding by e-signatures laws like the ESIGN Act, eIDAS, ETA, ITA-2000, and other regional and international laws.
Automated collaboration via integrations
Automation becomes simple with Zoho Sign, where you can integrate its signature functionalities with your everyday workplace apps. It tightly integrates with Zoho Books, Zoho Checkout, Zoho Billing, Zoho Practice, Zoho Invoice, and Zoho Inventory, as well as with popular workflow automation platforms like Zoho Flow, Zapier, Integrately, and Make for easy data management. Zoho Sign also provides APIs and SDKs that developers can use to plug and play within their existing financial paperwork automation tools.
Collect signatures and payments in one go
Zoho Sign's integration with Zoho Checkout allows customers to automate payment and signature collection together. The payment field in Zoho Sign can be used to request an amount to be paid, which the signer can then complete via their Zoho Checkout account. The document is signed after successful payment.
AI-based features
Accelerate your contract lifecycle with Zia, Zoho's generative AI assistant. Zia contextually summarizes lengthy documents, so you can skim material without missing important content. Plus, forget the hassle of dragging and dropping fields onto hundreds of pages; Zia detects field spaces and automatically fills them in a matter of seconds.
Faster turnaround time
Digitizing contracts means doing away with delays. With automatic reminders and an automated signature workflow, the process of printing, mailing, collecting signed documents, and resending them to other recipients is eliminated. Zoho Sign's real-time status tracking helps you see the document's stage in the financial contract lifecycle at any point in time. Companies have seen more than 80% faster document turnaround after switching to Zoho Sign.
Improved efficiency
Zoho Sign has helped companies save more than $30 per envelope and 50 hours per employee each year through signature workflow automation. Take repetitive tasks out of the equation with advanced features like templates, SignForms, bulk send, automatic backup, custom fields, and saved signature workflows. By mitigating errors, cutting down paperwork costs, and following a sustainable paperwork lifecycle, financial companies can boost their productivity and their output multifold.
Real-time tracking and traceability
With Zoho Sign, you can track where and with whom the financial contract is at any stage of operation. See if the document has been emailed, viewed, or signed, and check the time and the IP address from which the document was accessed. Zoho Sign also provides a free completion certificate for every signed document where all the details of the signed document are recorded. This gives end-to-end traceability of the signing workflow. Moreover, this establishes non-repudiability and accountability for parties signing finance contracts using Zoho Sign.
Centralized management
Features in Zoho Sign like automatic cloud backup and users and controls streamline the storage and access of financial documents. With centralized control over data-related permissions and by automated storage, organizations can easily untangle complicated webs of signature workflows and ensure prompt submissions during audits.
Commonly used financial contracts
- KYC documents
- Balance sheets
- Loan applications
- Credit reports
- Independent contract agreements
- Tax forms
- Nominee applications
- Beneficiary forms
- Compliance agreements
Zoho Sign integrates with popular finance apps to boost your productivity
Sign and collect signatures on invoices, estimates, credit notes, and purchase orders, and share signed documents via email from your Zoho Books account
Send invoices and estimates for signatures or sign them yourself straight from your Zoho Invoice records.
Send signed invoices, credit notes, and purchase orders to customers directly from Zoho Inventory.
Send digitally signed estimates and credit notes to your customers right from Zoho Billing.
Sign client requests directly from your Zoho Practice account.
Hear from our customers and see how Zoho Sign can boost your finance CLM!
FAQs
Electronic signatures are Absolutely! You can upload your finance contracts from your device or cloud storage app, or even scan or photograph them using your phone to sign them securely in the app.
With Zoho Sign, you can perform end-to-end finance CLM. Once your financial contracts are drafted, you can set the recipients' data, customize their individual experience, collect payments, design reusable templates, automate signed document storage, and download detailed audit reports. You can also collect signatures in bulk, sign from your mobile phone, authenticate signers, and integrate with other workplace apps for a seamless workflow to improve your signing experience with Zoho Sign.
Yes, you can integrate your existing finance apps with Zoho Sign's functionalities using our APIs, webhooks, and other software development kits. Learn more about Zoho Sign for developers.
Send us an email at support@zohosign.com with any questions or for technical assistance and our team will quickly assist you.
The signature choice of highly productive finance teams
Try for free today to see why 40,000+ companies trust Zoho Sign.