Designs for Health, nutritional products manufacturer, switches to signNow and benefits Immediately

Customer profile

Gary Xu is the Chief Accounting Officer, in charge of all financial and accounting activities for Designs For Health, a leading research-backed nutritional products manufacturer and distributor. Gary and his department communicate with a number of clients and vendors on a weekly basis and are responsible for managing correspondence where security and confidentiality need to be top notch. For Gary’s purposes, collecting and storing e-signed financial and medical documentation required that his files be distributed and received securely while still being able to easily access them when needed.

The Problem

Designs For Health had been using DocuSign for two years to collect electronic signatures, but found the service to be expensive and complex. “They had a limitation on how many documents can be signed” said Xu. The finance department was in need of a service that could fit their purposes of communicating and collecting e-signatures for confidential documentation.

Gary began looking at different websites and found a comparison between SignNow and Adobe Sign. “I needed to make sure that an e-signature [platform] could integrate with our ERP system, NetSuite” he said. Gary quickly noticed that SignNow is a partner of the NetSuite app. “I looked at some comments, main features and pricing and then contacted you guys.”

The Solution

SignNow’s integration with Netsuite, as well as Salesforce, SharePoint, Office 365, Google Apps for Work and other platforms, allows users to get all the benefits of e-signatures, payment collections and document collaboration using SignNow without leaving Netsuite. Before making the switch, Gary’s reservations were understandable, “When we switched to SignNow from DocuSign, [there were] three considerations: we wanted to lower our price and make it simpler, it didn’t have to be complex and finally it needed to be integrated with our ERP system. And we did achieve all three of these goals.”

Solution
Integration of SignNow

The custom integration of SignNow with NetSuite took Designs For Health’s IT team only a week to complete, compared with weeks and months that other companies spend integrating document platforms with their CRM and ERP systems. Gary and his department were well on their way to saving time, money and streamlining their e-signature processes. “My department uses SignNow significantly. Each month they send out between 50-100 requests to vendors to e-sign documents.” He continues, “Every month we add a lot of new vendors that receive commission and they need to provide us with their banking information. So we send out a request using SignNow and collect their paperless signature.”

Quotes

My department uses SignNow significantly. Each month they send out between 50-100 requests to vendors to e-sign documents.

  • Gary Xu, Chief Accounting Officer at Designs For Health

Convenient features that simplify workflows & reduce turnaround times

Get legally-binding signatures from your customers and partners in seconds. Specify the order in which signers will receive and sign documents: add signers or remove them if needed. Invite people to a team, share documents and track team activity.

Commercial invoice

A single web-based fillable form and eSignature platform is all one needs to create, send and receive signed documents electronically on their personal account. With SignNow’s advanced tools, Gary can create teams within his department and attach necessary documents for collecting signatures and payments. “I like the feature for dividing it [documents] into different teams so that each team can only see their own documents, that I like very much” said Xu, when asked about using SignNow teams for organizing his department’s workflows.

Gary’s Accounts Payable lead is, “very happy because she doesn’t have to go crazy with the back and forth of emails.” He continues, “With e-signatures, they can be tracked and we have a lot of positive feedback from other departments.” When asked about the amount of time SignNow saves him, Gary estimates that, “the whole cycle takes two minutes, before it was maybe ten minutes. That’s a saving of 8 minutes and you’re talking about 400-500 minutes a month. About eight hours.”

Top-notch security

Protect your documents by keeping your data confidential with advanced encryption and authentication. Keep track of all changes and signing events for each document using court-admissible audit trails. Protect medical records according to HIPAA security standards.

Top-notch security

Designs For Health needed a service that met health industry standards for security and offered additional features for their customers’ peace of mind. Tamper evident software and complete audit trails are used to view document activity. “Overall, I think it’s secure because it does give you the signer’s IP address so we can check if the signer is the right person” said Xu. “I’m happy with the security features.”

In addition, SignNow offers two-factor authentication for any document sent for signature. The sender of a document can set an individual password for a specific recipient or all of their invited signers and provide it directly or via SMS. Besides password protection, the sender can also choose from other methods of two-factor authentication for each signer such as verification via phone call or text message. “I do believe that a two-step verification is needed because when we sign into our email accounts, I want the security to be really high.” Xu added.

Facilitating communications, both internally and externally

Prefill documents with information you already have for recipients to complete faster. Avoid re-typing the same information by automatically importing an entire set of fields with labels into a new document. Make working with others easy by creating teams for sharing, signing and completing your templates.

Facilitating communications, both internally and externally

When offices have a single contract that needs to be passed around and completed with multiple signatures, SignNow is ready and waiting with features designed to facilitate internal exchanges. “When I say internally, let’s say there’s one contract that has to be shared and approved by multiple people. Now we can easily require people’s signatures in a sequence for whomever needs to sign, instead of using emails; [having to] copy and forward to everyone. So it facilitates internal communication” said Xu.

SignNow can embolden the image of your company to your business partners and clients. Gary believes that, “it improves a company’s image because when you use some e-signature software like this, it gives customers and vendors a feeling that you’re really, technologically speaking, advanced; you pay attention and use environmental friendly technology. It sends out the right message.”

Conclusion

Gary Xu began his search for a service that would give him and his department a simple solution for communicating and collecting e-signatures for confidential documentation without having to leave NetSuite. DocuSign’s limitations and pricing pushed Gary to explore other options. “When I started using it I thought I’d just give it a try with your representative that gave us a few demos. I thought it was pretty cool, then I started to test it for our finance department to collect banking information like W9’s and credit applications” he said.

What began as a brief introductory test ended up as a much larger implementation. “We started with only six licenses. Then I thought, gosh, I’m going to promote it within my organization” said Xu.

Because SignNow allows recipients to add signatures in the interface without a subscription, word quickly spread as colleagues and clients could try it out at their leisure. Gary added, “we expanded to a lot of departments: HR, Legal, QC, Customer Service, IT, Sales, they all used it for their own purposes.” When the various department heads experienced SignNow for themselves, they were quick to emulate Gary’s example, “SignNow is now used company-wide.”

For the complete paper, click on the link below: