Hold that idea for a moment, because almost everything people get wrong about electronic signing follows from not having it. When you sign with a pen, the paper is the evidence. The mark and the proof are the same object, and you keep it in a file at home. When you sign electronically, the file in front of you is only part of the evidence. The rest — who was invited, who opened it and from where, at what moment, what they were shown, what they agreed to, and whether a single character has changed since — sits in a system somewhere, usually one you do not own and did not choose. So the question that decides whether an electronic signature is worth anything is not the one everybody asks. It is not is this legal; that ground is settled. It is who is holding the evidence, and will it still be there on the day somebody disputes it? Three consequences follow, and they are the spine of this page. First, the signature is bound to one exact version of one exact file — change a comma and the binding breaks, by design, which is why a typo discovered after signing cannot simply be fixed. Second, the audit or completion record is a separate document, and it is the single most valuable thing in the whole process, and almost nobody downloads it. Third, the weakest joint is identity: an ordinary signing flow establishes that somebody had access to an inbox or a phone, which is not the same as establishing which human being that was. And running underneath all of it is a fourth thing worth saying plainly: valid and accepted are different words. The law may be perfectly content with your electronic signature while the counter in front of you is not, and being right does not help you on the morning it happens. This page is about all of that — what to settle before signing, what to download after, what should never be signed this way, and how to keep a file that still answers the question years later.
Picture the two objects side by side. A sheet of paper with ink on it: the mark and the evidence are the same physical thing, and whoever holds the paper holds the proof. Now an electronically signed file: the visible signature block on page four is a picture of a fact, and the fact itself is stored as data — some of it embedded in the file, some of it held by whatever service ran the signing.
That is not a technicality. It reorganises what you have to look after. With paper, the discipline is custody of an object: keep it dry, keep it somewhere you can find it, do not give away the only copy. With electronic signing, the discipline is custody of a record: know what the record consists of, know who is holding each part of it, and get your own copy of the parts you do not control.
People apply the paper habits to the electronic object and are surprised when they turn out to be insufficient. They save the PDF, exactly as they would file a contract in a drawer, and consider the job done. The PDF is the mark. The record is bigger.
Everything that follows on this page is an unpacking of that single sentence, and if you remember nothing else from here, remember to ask yourself, at the end of any electronic signing: what exactly do I now hold, and what is being held for me by somebody else?
An electronic signature is not attached to a document in the loose way a stapled page is attached to a bundle. It is computed from the file, so it corresponds to that file and no other. Alter a word, resave with different settings, replace a page — and the correspondence fails.
Almost everybody first meets this as an irritation. You spot a wrong pin code an hour after everybody has signed and discover that you cannot simply fix it. But turn it around and it is the whole reason the thing is worth anything. A signature that survived editing would be worthless, because it would tell a reader nothing about what was actually agreed. The brittleness is the feature.
Two practical rules follow, and they go at the top of any signing process:
Where the document is one we have prepared, this is part of what you are paying for: a file that is actually finished, formatted so it does not need to be re-made for a layout reason, which is what our PDF legal formatting service exists for.
If somebody one day questions a signature, the material that answers them is broader than the document. Depending on how the signing was run, it typically includes some or all of the following:
Notice how much of that list lives outside the document. Notice also how much of it lives outside your control — in an account, on a service, under a retention policy nobody read. That is the structural weakness of electronic signing, and it has exactly one remedy, which is the subject of the next section.
Most signing services produce, at the end, a summary of everything that happened: the parties, the addresses, the timestamps, the events, and a fingerprint of the document. It goes by different names. It is the single most valuable artefact the process produces, and in our experience the great majority of people have never saved one.
They do not save it for an understandable reason. At the moment it becomes available, nothing is in dispute, the document is signed, everybody is pleased, and the natural instinct is to download the contract and move on. The record is offered at precisely the moment it feels least necessary and demanded at precisely the moment it is impossible to get.
So make it mechanical. The signing is not finished until two files are in your folder. Give them the same base name so they stay together. Put them where a second person in the household or the office can find them. Do that on the day, not at the weekend.
And while you are there, note in one line where the signing was run and under which account, because in three years the useful question may be not “where is the file” but “whose login would have had this”.
Any signature, on paper or otherwise, is trying to establish three separate things, and it is worth naming them because they fail separately.
Read that list again and a pattern appears. Electronic signing is better than paper on two of the three and potentially much worse on the first. Which means the sensible effort in any significant signing goes into identity, and the rest can largely be left to the mechanism.
This framing is also the most useful thing to have in your head when somebody asks whether a particular method is “good enough”. Do not answer in the abstract. Ask which of the three the method establishes, and which of the three is likely to be attacked.
Here is the sentence to sit with. An ordinary signing flow establishes that somebody who could open a particular inbox, or receive a code on a particular phone, completed the process. It does not establish which human being that was.
For most documents that is perfectly adequate, and it is worth saying so rather than being alarmist. Between people who know each other, in a relationship with a history of correspondence, nobody is going to seriously contend that the person who has been emailing about the contract for three weeks was not the person who signed it.
It stops being adequate in three situations, and they are recognisable in advance:
In those cases, choose a route that verifies who is signing rather than only that they could open a message, and be willing to accept the extra friction that comes with it. Friction at the signing is cheap. Friction at the dispute is not.
And one absolute: never share your access with somebody so they can sign for you. Handing over an inbox or a one-time code does not delegate anything. It dismantles the only thing your signature was establishing, and it makes a later denial by you look exactly like a lie whether or not it is one. If somebody must act for you, that is an authority question, and a power of attorney is the instrument for it.
There are routes in which the signer’s identity is verified against a real credential at the moment of signing, rather than being inferred from access to a mailbox. Without naming systems or printing procedures — those change, and a stale description here would mislead somebody at a counter — the important thing is to understand what changes when you use one.
What changes is the answer to the first of the three questions. Instead of “somebody with access to this address signed”, the record says something closer to “a person who authenticated against this credential signed”. That is a materially different assertion and it is much harder to walk away from.
What does not change is anything else. It does not make the document valid if the document is defective. It does not make it acceptable to an office that wants ink. It does not remove any stamping requirement. And it does not relieve you of downloading the record.
The practical guidance is therefore simple and unfashionably boring: match the route to the stakes. A routine internal form does not need the strongest available method; a personal guarantee probably does. Deciding this deliberately, once, for each category of document you deal with, is what the one-page policy described later on this page is for.
The phrases electronic signature and digital signature certificate get used as though they were the same thing, and they are not. A certificate is a credential issued to a named holder after verification, held as a token or a file, used to sign in a way that is bound to that credential. It is a stronger and more formal instrument, it is what certain filings and portals specifically require, and it has its own lifecycle: application, verification, issue, expiry, renewal, and the possibility of being revoked.
Three things worth knowing without going further into a subject that deserves its own page:
Where you need one, our digital signature certificate and Class 3 DSC services handle the application; and where you are not sure which of the two kinds of signing your situation calls for, that is a two-minute question worth asking before you buy anything.
An enormous amount of ordinary business runs on a scanned signature dropped into a document and emailed. It is worth being honest about this rather than disapproving: it is fast, everybody understands it, and it works nearly all the time.
Understand precisely what it is, though. It is a picture of a signature. It carries no record of who placed it, when, or whether the surrounding text changed afterwards. Anybody who has ever received the image can place it on anything. It establishes none of the three things — not identity, not intent beyond the obvious, and certainly not integrity.
The consequence is not that it is useless. The consequence is that its entire strength is borrowed from the correspondence around it. If the email trail shows the document being negotiated, sent, and returned with the image attached, that trail is doing the work, and it is usually enough for ordinary matters.
So two rules of thumb. Keep the covering email, because the email is the evidence, not the picture. And do not use the pasted image for anything you would be upset to lose — a guarantee, a transfer, an undertaking with real consequences. For those, either sign properly or sign on paper.
One more thing, said plainly because people do it without thinking: do not circulate a clean image of your signature. Not in a message, not in a template, not to a designer making your letterhead. It is the easiest thing in the world to reuse.
People assume a signature requires a signing ceremony of some kind, and are startled to learn that a great deal of what they do casually may already bind them. An exchange in which terms are set out and somebody replies agreeing to them can be a complete arrangement, without any signature block anywhere.
That cuts both ways and both are worth internalising. You may be bound by a cheerful one-line reply on a Friday evening. And you may be able to rely on the other side’s equally cheerful one-line reply when they later say nothing was concluded.
The practical habits that follow are small:
Where the arrangement matters, of course, the better answer is to put it in a proper document rather than relying on a chain of messages, which is what our agreement drafting and online agreement drafting services are for.
Contracting by electronic means is recognised in Indian law, and a contract is not unenforceable merely because it was formed electronically. That is settled ground, not a grey area, and this page is not going to reproduce the provision when it is already set out properly, with the section text itself, in our non-disclosure agreement guide.
What is worth adding here is the shape of the practical problem, which is entirely different from the legal one. Nobody in a real dispute argues that electronic contracts do not exist. What they argue is narrower and much harder to answer: that was not me, or that is not the version I agreed, or I never saw that page. None of those are answered by the law recognising electronic form. They are answered by the record.
Which is why this page spends its length on evidence rather than on validity. The legal question was settled years ago. The evidential question is settled, or not, by what you did on the afternoon you signed.
Some categories of document are kept outside electronic execution by law, and others are kept outside it in practice by whoever must accept them. This page deliberately prints no list of either kind. Lists like that change, and a reader who trusted a stale one would sign an important document in a way that cannot be undone.
What we can give you is a reliable test, which is better than a list anyway. Ask the question in the direction of the person who will receive the document. Before signing, ask the registry, the bank, the department, the consulate or the counterparty: will you accept this executed electronically, and if so in what form? Ask it in writing where you can, so that the answer is itself a record.
Three families of document where the answer is unusually likely to be no, and where you should therefore ask before rather than after:
None of that is a legal ruling and it is not offered as one. It is where to point your caution.
Registration deserves its own paragraph because the failure is so expensive. A document that has to be registered must satisfy the registering office’s requirements about how it was executed and how the parties presented themselves, and those requirements are set by that office and its rules rather than by general principle.
The specific trap is doing things in the wrong order. People sign electronically because it is convenient, then take the file to be registered, then learn that the execution does not fit — and by then there is a signed document that cannot simply be adjusted, a stamping decision that may already have been made, and parties who have to be reassembled.
So for anything registrable, reverse the order entirely: find out how the office wants it executed, and then execute it that way. One enquiry, at the beginning, before a single signature exists. Our agreement drafting work always begins with that question for exactly this reason.
Notarisation and attestation are not signatures; they are somebody else’s statement about your signature or about a document. That makes them a different problem, because the person doing it generally has to observe something and record what they observed.
Where a document needs notarisation or attestation, decide at the start how that will sit alongside electronic signing, because bolting it on afterwards usually means printing the document and starting again. Frequently the honest answer is that the document should simply be executed on paper, and accepting that early saves a great deal of effort.
The related habit worth having: do not assume a document needs notarisation because it looks serious. A surprising number of documents are notarised out of custom rather than requirement, and a surprising number of others genuinely need it. Ask which yours is. Our notary attestation and notary agreement services handle the ones that do, and our certified true copy guide explains a related confusion — that certifying a copy and attesting a signature are two different acts with different meanings.
Stamp duty is a separate obligation from signature and it has its own rules, its own timing and its own consequences. This page states none of them, because they are set out carefully, with the sections and the case law, in our e-stamp paper guide, and a partial retelling here would be worse than useless.
What belongs on this page is one operational point: settle the stamping question before the signing, not after. The reason is the same brittleness described at the top. Once signatures exist, the document is fixed, and any answer that requires the document to be different requires the signatures to be gathered again.
So the sequence for any document where duty might arise is: decide whether duty applies and how it will be paid; do that; then finalise the file; then sign. Three steps in that order cost one afternoon. The same three steps in the wrong order can cost a week and a fresh round of goodwill.
This is the section that saves the most wasted mornings. Whether something is legally effective and whether a particular office will take it are separate questions, and they are answered by different people.
An institution may decline an electronically signed document for reasons that have nothing to do with law: an internal policy, a system that only accepts a scan of an inked page, a clerk who has not seen one before, a checklist written in 2011. You may be entirely right about the law and it will not move the queue.
The practical approach has three parts:
And do not generalise from one success. An office accepting an electronically signed document last March tells you very little about a different office, a different document type, or the same office this year.
It will happen, and how you respond decides whether it costs an hour or a week.
First, establish what is actually being refused, because “we don’t accept this” covers several different objections. Is it the electronic execution as such? The absence of an ink signature on a particular page? A missing attestation? A format they cannot open? Each has a different answer, and three of the four are easy.
Second, ask what they would accept, in writing if possible. That single question converts a refusal into a specification, and people at counters are usually far more willing to describe what works than to justify what does not.
Third, do not argue the law across a counter. You will not win, the person in front of you probably cannot change the rule even if persuaded, and the attempt costs you the goodwill you need for the practical solution. Escalate in writing later if the refusal is genuinely wrong — our application drafting service prepares that kind of letter, and our application drafting guide explains why the specific ask outperforms the general complaint.
Almost every re-signing we have seen was caused by doing these steps in the wrong sequence. Written out, it is obvious; done under time pressure, it is routinely bungled.
Eight steps, and the first two are the ones people skip. They are also the only two that cannot be repaired afterwards without redoing everything below them.
It happens to everyone eventually, and the instinct — open the file, correct it, resave — is precisely the wrong one. Doing that produces a document whose signature no longer matches, which is worse than the typo: it looks like tampering even though it was carelessness.
There are two honest routes, and which one to use depends on how much the error matters.
What is never a route, and what we will not assist with, is quietly producing a fresh copy that carries the old signatures. That is not correcting a document; it is making a different one look like the one people signed.
In any negotiation of substance there will be several drafts, and they will have names like final, final revised and final v3 clean. The signing has to attach to one of them, and six months later somebody has to be able to say which.
The mechanism helps you here more than paper ever did, because the signed file carries a fingerprint of itself and any alteration shows. But it only helps if you can find the file. The failure is rarely cryptographic; it is somebody looking through a folder of eleven near-identical documents.
Three habits, none of which take effort:
Where a large number of old documents need to be brought into order in the first place, that is a digitisation job rather than a signing one, and our document digitisation and OCR service is the honest starting point for it.
A document with one signer is simple. A document with four is a small project, and the things that go wrong are organisational rather than technical.
Decide, before circulating, four things that otherwise get decided by accident:
And chase the stragglers politely but promptly. The most common way a multi-party signing fails is not refusal; it is one person who meant to get to it and then had a fortnight.
Two different situations that look alike and fail differently.
Signing for an organisation raises the question of authority: whether the person signing was permitted to bind it. Electronically this is invisible, because the signature block shows a name and an email address rather than a chair. So say it in the document — the person’s capacity, and the authority they are acting under — and, where the transaction matters, keep whatever internal authorisation exists alongside the signed file.
Signing for a person raises the question of instrument. Somebody can act for another only where there is authority to do so, and that authority is a document with its own requirements about how it is made. Our power of attorney drafting service prepares these, and the requirements for the authority itself may well be stricter than for the thing being signed under it.
The failure that covers both: convenience delegation. An assistant who signs because the director is travelling; a son who signs because the father is unwell. Both are ordinary human responses and both create a document whose signature belongs to nobody. If the person cannot sign, the answer is authority, not a borrowed login.
A witness exists to be able to say, later, that they saw the signing happen. That purpose is what makes witnesses awkward in an electronic flow, where the signing is a private act performed alone in front of a screen.
If a document needs witnesses, decide how the observation will actually occur. Being in the same room and watching the screen works. A video call in which the witness sees the act works in practice for many purposes. Sending the document to a witness afterwards to add their name does not, in any meaningful sense — it produces a name where a witness should be.
Two further points. Record what the witness observed and how, in a line in the document or in a short note, because in three years nobody will remember. And choose witnesses who are independent of the transaction and who can actually be found later; a witness who has moved abroad and changed their number is a decoration.
Where a document genuinely requires witnesses in a particular form, that is often the point at which the sensible decision is to execute it on paper and stop fighting the medium.
These are two different facts and confusing them causes real trouble.
A document may be expressed to speak from a particular date — the day a tenancy begins, the day an arrangement is to take effect. The signatures carry their own dates, which are the days people actually signed. There is nothing improper about those being different, and in a multi-party signing they nearly always are.
What is required is that the document be honest about it. A line stating the date the document is made, and a line stating that it takes effect from some other date, and the signature dates speaking for themselves — that arrangement is clear to any reader and creates no difficulty.
What creates difficulty, and what we decline, is writing a date designed to make the signing appear to have happened earlier than it did. Electronic signing is a poor medium for that in any case, because the record says otherwise and you do not control the record. But the reason we refuse is not that it fails; it is that it is a false statement in a document whose entire purpose is to be relied on.
The single most common cause of a signed document being unavailable when needed is not a technical failure. It is that it was on one laptop, or in one person’s inbox, and that person or that laptop is no longer around.
A workable arrangement for an individual: a folder, backed up somewhere that is not the same device, with each executed document and its record stored together and named so that a stranger could find them. Tell one other person in the household where it is. That is the whole system.
For a small business, the same thing with one addition: one location, not each person’s own. Executed documents belong in a shared place with a naming convention, and somebody has to be responsible for checking that things actually arrive there. The failure mode is always the same — everyone assumed it was somebody else’s copy that was being kept.
And keep the original files rather than only printouts. The file is the document; the paper is a picture of it. Where you want government-issued papers held in a form that institutions will pull directly, our DigiLocker assistance service sets that up, which is a different thing from storing your own signed agreements but often part of the same tidying-up.
You will need paper copies, because offices ask for them. Understand what you are handing over.
A printout of an electronically signed file is a picture of a record. The signature verification, the seal, the audit data — none of that survives the printer. What the paper shows is that a signature block existed, which is roughly the evidential weight of a photocopy.
That is usually fine, because the paper is being used to satisfy a process rather than to prove anything contested. But it means two things. Keep the file as the original and treat every printout as a copy, no matter how official it looks. And when a printed copy is going to somebody who may actually have to rely on it, send the file as well, so that they hold something that can be checked.
Where a printed set has to look right for a formal submission — pagination, annexures, an index that matches — that is presentation work, and our PDF legal formatting service does it so that nothing has to be re-signed for a layout reason.
Two things happen when you share a signed file, and only one of them is intended. The recipient gets what they need; and the recipient acquires a permanent, complete, forwardable copy of a document with your signature on it.
That is fine most of the time and worth a thought some of the time. Consider what else is in the document beyond the part they need — other parties’ addresses, identity numbers, commercial terms, a bank account. Consider whether a specific extract, or a letter confirming the relevant fact, would do the job instead. Frequently it would.
Three small practices worth adopting:
Our certified true copy guide deals with the related question of when a copy of a document will be accepted in place of the thing itself, and what a certifier is actually vouching for when they endorse one.
This is the day the whole page has been preparing for, and it is decided almost entirely by what you did months earlier.
Assemble, in this order: the signed file; the audit or completion record; the invitation and the correspondence around it; any identity verification; and your own contemporaneous note of who was dealing with you and from which address. Put them together in date order before you say anything, because a sequence is far more persuasive than an assertion.
Then respond factually and once. Set out what was sent, to whom, when, what the record shows, and attach it. Do not argue about motives. A denial met with a tidy chronology very often ends there, because the person denying can see what a reader would see.
Where it does not end there, the dispute is no longer about the signature; it is about the underlying obligation, and that is a different kind of problem with a different kind of help. What this page can tell you is the thing you cannot do anything about at that stage: the file you kept is the file you have. Nothing can be added to it afterwards.
Documents get cancelled, replaced and varied all the time, and there is a right way to do it that takes about the same effort as the wrong way.
The right way is additive. You do not edit an executed document; you create a new one that says what is happening — that the earlier document is cancelled, or replaced, or varied in stated respects — identifying the original precisely and signed by the same parties. The original stays in the folder, marked as superseded.
The wrong way is subtractive: deleting, overwriting, or producing a corrected file and letting the old one disappear. It destroys the history, and the history is frequently the thing that explains why the parties did what they did.
Where an arrangement is being unwound rather than amended, the document that does it deserves as much care as the one that created it, and our agreement drafting service treats it that way rather than as an afterthought.
Signing services are ordinary businesses. They change owners, change plans, retire features, and occasionally shut. Accounts lapse when a subscription ends or when the colleague who set it up leaves.
None of that touches the files you downloaded. All of it may touch anything you left behind — the audit record you did not save, the copy you assumed would always be retrievable, the account history you were relying on to show a sequence of signings.
Two precautions, both cheap. Download at the time, which by now you have read three times on this page for good reason. And if a business is changing services or letting one lapse, spend an hour going through and pulling down everything before the access ends, rather than discovering the gap two years later.
It is also worth keeping, somewhere outside the service, a plain list of what was signed and when. A one-line index in a spreadsheet survives every commercial change that a platform can go through.
Fake signing requests are a common and effective fraud, precisely because a genuine one looks like routine work: an email, a button, a familiar-looking page, and a small feeling of obligation.
The rules are the same as for any unexpected request involving money or authority, and they are worth being boring about:
And if something has already gone wrong, act quickly rather than quietly: tell the counterparty, preserve everything including the fraudulent message, and get advice about the specific document. The instinct to sort it out privately before telling anybody is what turns a small problem into a large one.
Somebody holds out a phone. It is already open at the signature page. There are people waiting. This is an extremely common way for people to sign things they have not read, and it is worth having a prepared response.
The response is: send it to me and I will sign it in an hour. That sentence is polite, reasonable, and almost impossible to object to. Anybody with a legitimate request loses nothing by it. The reaction to it is itself informative.
The underlying principle is worth stating plainly because people assume otherwise: a document you signed without reading is still your document. Not having read it is not a defence, and “they rushed me” is not an argument that gets far.
The same applies to the small version of this — signing something because the other person is standing there, or because saying no feels rude. The awkwardness of asking for an hour is a great deal smaller than the awkwardness of the alternative.
A very common and entirely decent situation: a parent or an elderly relative has to sign something, and they do not use a computer. The temptation is to do it for them, and the distinction that matters is small and absolute.
Help them to sign. Do not sign for them. Set the device up. Make the text large. Read the document aloud and explain in plain words what it does and what it commits them to. Answer their questions properly, including the ones that seem obvious. Then let the act be theirs, with their finger or their hand on the device.
Do it without hurry and without irritation, and do it in front of somebody else in the family where the document has any significance, because that second person is the answer to any later suggestion that the signer did not understand.
Where somebody genuinely cannot act for themselves at all, this stops being a question about technology and becomes a question about authority and capacity. That is not something to improvise around, and it is one of the situations where taking proper advice first is the kind thing as well as the correct thing.
Organisations do not need a manual for this. They need one page that answers five questions, and having it prevents both of the common failures — nobody can find anything, and somebody signed something they had no business signing.
That page takes an afternoon to write and it is the difference between a business that can produce any contract in five minutes and one that cannot find last year’s. Where the documents themselves need to be brought up to standard at the same time, our online documentation service does that work, and our non-disclosure agreement and agreement drafting services supply the templates the policy then governs.
For every executed document, a complete set is five items and takes two minutes to assemble on the day:
That last line is the one people skip and the one that pays. Three years later you are not looking at a folder with fresh eyes; you are looking at it with no memory at all, and one sentence written on the day is worth an hour of reconstruction.
Keep the whole set for as long as the document could matter, which is longer than people assume — well past the end of the arrangement, because questions arise about things that finished years ago. Storage is free. Reconstruction is not.
Five of the six were decided before the signature, and the sixth was decided in the ten minutes after it.
The document itself in whatever form you have it, and the plain facts around it: who has to sign, who has to accept it at the other end, whether anything has already been stamped or attested, and when it needs to be done by. If there is correspondence about it, send that too — it usually tells us more about the real constraint than the document does.
If you are not sure whether the document should be signed electronically at all, say so and send it anyway. That is a question we would rather answer before you have spent anything than after you have signed something the receiving office will not take.
We will come back the same working day, ordinarily, with three things: whether this should be signed this way, what has to happen first, and what you will be holding at the end.
And we will tell you when you do not need us. A straightforward document between two people who know each other does not require anybody’s help, and saying so is part of the job.
We prepare documents, run the signing and keep the process in order. We do not advise on the merits of a dispute, appear for anybody, or give an opinion on whether a particular signature will withstand a challenge in a particular case. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. Our find an advocate page is where to start, and you deal with them directly.
Where a signature is already being disputed, or where the document is significant enough that its execution may be attacked, we will say at the outset that the conversation should begin there rather than with us.
Our part begins at ₹299, usually Same day at our end once the document is settled, and you are told the entire figure before anything starts. Nothing is payable in advance. Several documents signed in one sitting are quoted together rather than separately.
Anything a third party charges — a certificate, an attestation, duty — is its own figure, belongs to that third party, and is told to you as a separate number rather than folded into ours.
What adds time is almost never the signing. It is the question that should have been asked first: whether the receiving office will take it. We ask it at the start, which occasionally makes the first day slower and reliably makes the week faster.
And the closing note, because most of this needs nobody’s help at all: ask who has to accept it before you sign. Finish the text before you circulate it. Match the identity check to what is at stake. Download the record as well as the document, the same day. Store both where a second person can find them. And never sign anything in two minutes because somebody is holding out a phone. Six habits. They cost nothing and they are the whole difference between a signature that answers a question and one that starts an argument.
An electronic signature is a record, not a mark, and the record is bigger than the document you are looking at. We check first whether the office at the other end will actually accept one, put stamping, attestation and the text in the right order so nothing has to be signed twice, match the identity check to what is at stake, run the signing, and hand you both outputs together with a plain note of what you are holding and where it should live. And where the honest answer is that your document should be signed on paper, we say so on the first call.
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