4 reasons why you should NOT store your contacts in your eSignature service

Electronic signature solutions are becoming more and more popular in today’s business world. There’s much to love: they are easy to use, fast and environmentally friendly as you don’t have to print documents only to scan them later.

Many eSignature services also allow you to store and manage your contracts in the solution. Sounds handy, but there are several reasons why you should think twice about using this feature.

Here’s what you should consider:

1. You can’t store ALL your contracts in your eSignature service

Let’s say that you sign customer contracts online and store them to the eSignature service. What about all of your other contracts?

On the purchasing side, you might be forced to use your vendor’s eSignature solution – which is probably not integrated with your eSignature solution. You most likely have a lot of old contracts, either on paper or scattered around in your team’s inboxes or computer folders.

Real transparency and control of your organization’s contracts can only be achieved when ALL contracts are stored in the same location – and most eSignature services do not allow this.

2. Your eSignature solution might not provide a permanent storage

Some eSignature solutions provide contract archiving for only a limited time period. That might be as short as 30 days. However, in real life you have to hold on to your contracts for much longer – even a 7-year archiving period is needed with certain contracts.

3. Limited functionality in post-sign contract management

eSignature solutions are mainly built for a smooth and reliable signing process – this is the thing that they do really well.

At the same time, they might lack essential post-sign management features, such as power search, team support, contract activities and reminders, e-mail archiving or audit log.

4. Vendor lock-in

The eSignature landscape is evolving fast and new players enter the market almost every day. Existing service providers disappear or merge with other companies.

What if you want to change your eSignature provider? Having stored all your existing contracts only in one solution might make things significantly more complicated.

Managing your signed contracts the right way

Zefort is a contract management solution for ALL of your organization’s contracts. Zefort integrates seamlessly with the leading eSignature solutions. Using Zefort as a central place for all of your signed contracts solves all of the issues listed above.