The success of e-signing isn’t measured by whether everyone uses it. What matters is whether something in your business processes has measurably improved.
BetrSign is a secure, legally compliant cloud-based e-signing service developed by SETCCE for companies that want to manage the entire process, from document preparation to storing the signed copy.
You can see how much faster and more efficient your business processes have become after introducing e-signing in a few simple numbers.
Track these seven performance indicators:
All figures used below are illustrative examples, not actual results measured among our customers. Your baseline and your results will be different.
Before e-signing, you printed a document and sent it to the customer.
Then you waited for it to come back signed.
You sent an email.
And waited again.
Maybe you made a phone call.
And waited.
Eventually, the document arrived. You put it on the scanner, digitized it, and finally saved it.
Most of the uncertainty happens during all that waiting:
Is the signer at work?
Are they in the office?
Did they even receive the document?
Then you introduce e-signing.
Great.
Now, while you’re waiting, several things can happen automatically and independently of you: the e-signing service can send reminders, and the signer can sign the document wherever and whenever it suits them.
That can significantly shorten the time it takes to obtain a signature.
And that, in turn, can speed up a project, a new hire, a sales agreement, issuing an invoice – and getting paid.
You may also see other improvements.
If documents no longer get stuck in the process, you may be able to complete more signing workflows in less time and, as a result, close more business.
Employees who used to spend time on paperwork can devote more of their day to higher-value processes – and, above all, to the work you actually hired them to do.
There’s also the financial side. We’ve already written about how much e-signing can cost and how much it can save .
But this time, we’re interested in more than money.
We want to know whether our business processes are actually more efficient.
Of course, you carefully measured the current state of your process before introducing e-signing so you’d have something to compare against.
Didn’t you?
You’re not alone.
One of the five most common mistakes companies make when introducing e-signing is treating implementation as a one-time project and never measuring its success afterward.
Let’s say you sent a document on Monday at 10:00 a.m. and received it back signed on Thursday at 2:00 p.m.
That’s 76 hours.
In the meantime, you sent the signer two emails and called once.
Maybe you also printed the document, signed it yourself, scanned it, and filed it.
Let’s call that your “baseline”.
Now repeat the process and measure it again.
This time, the electronically signed document comes back within hours.
Because different business processes involve different types of documents, you should measure them separately.
Track sales agreements separately from NDAs, HR documents separately from handover reports, and so on.
If you’re not sure where to begin, we’ve also prepared an overview of the business processes that make the most sense to digitize first .
Now, let’s get to those KPIs.
If you tracked only one metric, you’d probably start with the most obvious one: How long does it take to get a signature?
In other words, measure the time from when you send the document to the signer until the signing workflow is complete.
Example: You send a document on Monday at 9:00 a.m. and receive the signed version at 3:30 p.m. the same day.
Time to signature: 6 hours and 30 minutes.
Another document takes two days. A third takes four hours.
At the end of the month, calculate the average.
Why does this KPI matter?
Because it captures the part of the process that is often the biggest problem of all: waiting.
No matter how efficient the employee preparing and sending the document is, the entire process can still take days – or even weeks – if you are waiting for a traditional signature.
If your average time to signature used to be 76 hours and is now 18, the improvement is obvious.
This KPI becomes even more useful when you track it by document type.
That way, you can quickly see which processes are running smoothly and which ones are still getting stuck.
Document status tracking is a useful feature that lets you see where things stand at any moment. We’ve written more about how features such as status tracking, reminders, and signing order can reduce manual work in 5 E-signing features that speed up your business .
An average doesn’t always tell the whole story. Imagine you have ten documents.
Nine are signed within two hours.
The tenth takes seven days.
That’s why it also makes sense to measure the percentage of documents signed within a target time that you define as acceptable.
Example: Your target is to have a contract signed within 24 hours.
You send 100 contracts in one month, and 78 of them are signed within that timeframe.
Your KPI is therefore: 78% of documents signed within the target time.
Now you’ve replaced a vague word like “fast” with a concrete number you can improve over time.
Again, follow actual business processes and document types.
For example:
How many signing workflows do you actually complete successfully?
Example: You send 200 documents and receive 186 of them back signed.
Your completion rate is 93%.
What happened to the remaining 7%?
Perhaps the signer never responded.
Maybe the email address was incorrect.
The signer may have rejected the document.
Or perhaps you canceled the workflow and sent a revised version.
Your completion rate may never reach 100% – and perhaps it shouldn’t.
But if it is improving, that’s usually a good sign that your signing process is clear and easy to complete.
The type of electronic signature you require can also affect this rate.
A simple electronic signature (SES) generally involves fewer identity-verification steps, while advanced (AES) and qualified electronic signatures (QES) require additional steps.
Each additional step is another opportunity for a signer to abandon the process.
If completion rates are low for a particular document type, first ask whether you truly need the strongest signature type for that use case.
When analyzing individual signing workflows, remember that the audit trail securely records events for each document.
We explain what an audit trail is and why it matters in Audit trails for security and peace of mind .
Why should you care about how many reminders you send?
Because reminders are a very good indicator of friction in the process.
If almost every document – or signer – requires three or four reminders, it’s worth asking why.
There may be several reasons:
Example: Divide the total number of reminders sent by the number of signing workflows.
If you sent 140 reminders for 100 signing workflows, your average is: 1.4 reminders per workflow.
If that number decreases over time, you’ve probably improved the process.
If it keeps rising, something likely needs to change.
Not sure which of these metrics you can track in your current solution? You can try BetrSign free for 30 days and measure the numbers using your own documents.
Manual work is easy to overlook when calculating the real cost of paperwork.
And we’re not talking about the work that goes into writing the document itself.
We mean the logistics around the document:
Example: If all of that takes 12 minutes per document, then 500 documents per month require 6,000 minutes – or 100 hours of administrative work.
If e-signing reduces that to four minutes per document, 500 documents require about 33 hours.
The difference is hard to miss.
Some of those costs are obvious.
Others aren’t.
We’ve covered the ones businesses tend to overlook in 7 hidden costs of paperwork .
What that means in dollars depends on your volume and the plan you choose.
When calculating it, include employee time, paper, printing, and other costs associated with traditional signing.
You’ll probably notice the difference between the old and new signing process within the first few weeks of measuring.
Speed isn’t everything. You may get a document signed in just a few minutes – only to discover afterward that an important piece of information is missing or incorrect.
That’s why it makes sense to track documents you had to restart because of an error.
What kinds of errors?
The wrong signer.
The wrong document version.
Missing or incorrect information.
An incompletely filled-out document.
To calculate the correction rate, divide the number of documents you had to resend because of an error by the total number of documents sent, then multiply by 100.
Example: You send 500 documents and have to correct and resend 25.
Your correction rate is 5%.
You can prevent many errors during document preparation.
If you need information the signer can provide – such as an address, date, tax ID, or confirmation of a particular choice – use interactive input fields .
That makes it less likely that you’ll receive a signed document that is still incomplete or incorrectly filled out.
This may be the most interesting KPI of all.
It tells you whether you’ve improved just the signing process – or the business process itself.
How much time passes between the signature and:
In many ways, this metric matters even more than time to signature.
An electronic signature isn’t the end goal.
It links two business events.
That’s why this KPI is the one most closely connected to the reason you introduced e-signing in the first place:
|
KPI |
What it measures |
How to calculate it |
Why it matters |
|
Average time to signature |
Time from sending the document to completion of the signing workflow |
total signing time ÷ number of documents |
Shows how much waiting time has been reduced |
|
Percentage of documents signed within the target time |
How many documents are signed within a target, such as 24 hours |
documents signed within target ÷ all documents sent × 100 |
Shows how consistently the process meets expected turnaround times |
|
Signing completion rate |
How many sent documents are successfully completed |
completed workflows ÷ sent documents × 100 |
Identifies documents that drop out of the process |
|
Average number of reminders per signing workflow |
How much follow-up the average workflow requires |
total reminders sent ÷ number of workflows |
Reveals friction and the amount of follow-up required |
|
Manual work per signing workflow |
How much employee time the process requires |
minutes per document × number of documents |
Shows the actual administrative time savings |
|
Percentage of documents requiring correction or resending |
How many workflows have to be repeated because of errors |
resent documents ÷ all documents sent × 100 |
Measures process quality |
|
Time from signature to the next business step |
Time from signing to invoicing, onboarding, project delivery, etc. |
average time from signature to the next business event |
Shows the impact of signing on the broader business process |
We don’t expect you to start measuring everything at once.
Instead, choose two or three KPIs that are directly connected to the reason you introduced e-signing.
If your biggest challenge is speed, measure average time to signature and the percentage of documents signed within the target time.
If administrative work is the problem, measure manual work per document and the number of reminders sent.
If errors are causing the most frustration, track the percentage of documents that need correction or a restarted workflow.
If you want to improve sales, measure the time from offer acceptance to signed contract – and then the time from signature to delivery or project kickoff.
If your goal is more efficient HR, measure the time from job-offer acceptance to completed employment documentation.
KPIs should be tied directly to real business challenges. Otherwise, they’re just more numbers.
A good example of measurable impact comes from A1 Slovenia. After switching to e-signing, the company calculated that it saves more than 20 tons of paper every year , while employee time savings are measured in days.
You can also explore more of our customer success stories .
At first glance, it seems easy to measure the success of an e-signing rollout: How many documents did we create? How many users do we have? How many signatures did we collect?
But the more interesting questions are:
How much faster did it happen?
How much manual work did we eliminate?
How much did the error rate decrease?
And how much faster did the business outcome happen because the signature happened sooner?
That’s where the real effectiveness of e-signing becomes visible.
And the strongest proof of e-signing’s value to your business won’t come from our marketing department.
It will come from your own data.
Before introducing e-signing, measure your baseline. Then choose two or three KPIs. Measure again after a few months. You may discover that:
You can try BetrSign free for 30 days using your own documents and processes.
It’s also a great opportunity – and enough time – to establish your baseline and start putting real numbers behind the improvement.
Should you like to learn more, you can book a demo with one of our experts. They’ll be happy to answer your questions and show you the e-signing service firsthand.
And if you’re still comparing providers, take a look at our DocuSign vs. BetrSign comparison.
For most companies, the best place to start is the average time between sending a document and receiving the signature.
It is easy to understand and immediately shows whether your signing process has become faster.
Two or three are usually enough to start. Choose them based on the problem you’re trying to solve.
If your goal is to reduce waiting time, track time to signature.
If you want to reduce paperwork, track manual work and the number of reminders sent.
The e-signing service generates some data automatically, including document statuses, audit trail data, and reminders sent.
Other information – such as the time employees spend preparing documents or the time from signature to the next business event – will need to be tracked separately, either in a spreadsheet or in the system where the document originates.
The measurement period should be long enough to capture a representative sample of your typical documents.
If you process a high volume of signing workflows, a few weeks may be enough.
For lower volumes, a longer period may make more sense.
The most important thing is to compare similar document types and similar business periods.
There is no universal number.
The comparison that matters most is your own baseline before introducing e-signing, broken down by document type.
An NDA will usually be signed faster than a complex B2B agreement.
Instead of aiming for a generic benchmark, set your own goal – for example, cutting the average time to signature in half during the first year.
It can be useful for measuring adoption, but on its own it doesn't prove efficiency.
More signed documents do not necessarily mean a faster or better process.
That’s why you should pair it with metrics such as time to signature, completion rate, manual work, and other performance indicators.
Start by estimating how much active employee time one document requires: printing, sending, checking status, following up, scanning, and storing.
Then measure the same activities after introducing e-signing and multiply the difference by the number of documents processed.
Yes. You can convert administrative time into labor cost, then combine it with the cost of paper, printing, postage, and other direct expenses.
Compare that amount with the cost of the e-signing service – you can find pricing on the Pricing page .
It also makes sense to include broader business benefits from completing processes faster.
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