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Adobe Sign for Small Business Debuts to Help Small Companies Digitize

Press release from the issuing company

Adobe Study Shows Small Business Employees Rank Paper-Based Processes as Top Impediment to Productivity

San Jose, Calif. — Adobe today introduced Adobe Sign for small business, delivering e-signature capabilities that are powerful enough for the enterprise, but tailored to the needs of small business users. According to new research from Adobe, small business employees rank paper-based processes as a top impediment to running their business more efficiently, with 75% reporting that they still sign documents with pen and paper. When combined with other market-leading document technologies, including Adobe Scan and Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Sign for small business helps companies digitize legacy work practices that rely on signatures, like customer onboarding, contracts and approvals, payments and invoices, and much more. In addition, for individuals getting their side hustle off the ground, Adobe Sign is now integrated into the Acrobat Reader desktop app, enabling hundreds of millions of people who have Acrobat Reader installed to send two documents for e-signature each month, free of charge.

“Millions of small businesses already rely on Adobe to simplify document work — converting paper to digital with Adobe Scan, creating, reviewing and editing PDFs with Adobe Acrobat and accessing the most powerful PDF services right from Microsoft Office 365,” said Ashley Still, vice president and general manager, Adobe Document Cloud. “Adobe Sign for small business now completes the toolbox for small companies to fully digitize their business.”

Start Gathering e-Signatures for Free with Acrobat Reader

Adobe is integrating the most trusted e-signature solution, Adobe Sign, into the Acrobat Reader desktop app. Individuals will soon be able to send up to two documents for e-signature each month, free of charge, for the times when they need someone else to sign a document. This functionality will soon be rolled out globally to the hundreds of millions of users who upgrade to the latest version of Acrobat Reader.

Introducing Adobe Sign for Small Business

The majority of Fortune 100 companies rely on Adobe Sign for fast, secure e-signatures that increase business efficiency while ensuring the best employee and customer experiences. But why should the enterprise be the sole beneficiary of going digital? Now Adobe Sign for small business will help millions of smaller companies attract new customers, win their loyalty and hire and onboard talent with ease, all at an affordable subscription price. With Sign for small business, you can:

Sign up customers directly from your site: PDF forms are used for everything from gathering your customer’s contact information to collecting their signature on a service agreement. But providing a PDF that your customer then needs to download, print, physically sign and email back is far from a good experience. Now with Adobe Sign you can take any existing PDF form and automatically convert it to an online web form, giving your customers a modern, completely digital interaction with your brand.

Let customers sign and pay for services in a single step: One sure way to lose new customers is to put them through too many steps to complete a purchase. When customers first sign a contract online, like when joining a sports club, redirecting them to yet another form for payment risks losing them. Thanks to the Adobe Sign integration with Braintree, a PayPal service, it’s now easy for small businesses to collect payments from customers right as they fill out and sign a form.

Bulk send a single form to hundreds at once: Small companies often need to send a standard agreement to multiple recipients for signature, such as an outdoor adventure club that needs one hundred-plus people to sign a release of liability for a group outing. Sending the form to each recipient one-by-one wastes time and makes it difficult to track responses. Now small businesses can automate the process of collecting tens to hundreds of signatures at once with the click of a button, and easily track which signatures are outstanding.
Small Business Employees are Drowning in Paperwork

For many of the 30 million small businesses in the U.S. alone, paperwork is still grinding productivity to a halt. A new study from Adobe surveyed 500 small business employees in the U.S. who work with documents and contracts. Of those surveyed, three-quarters (75%) are still signing documents manually. The majority (84%) of small company employees report that it is important for them to move from paper to digital processes, yet only a small fraction (3%) have begun to fully do so. Nearly half (42%) of small company employees report that paper-based processes slow their productivity. Further, they rank it as the biggest impediment to making their business more efficient. With existing research from Forrester suggesting that each document signed manually costs 1.3 hours and $11 in time spent, small business employees in the U.S. can save their companies significant time and money by using electronic signatures. See the full research results here.

“For years, Adobe has helped me run my business in a more efficient way. I work on-the-go and communicate with my team a lot, and I wouldn’t be able to do that nearly as much without Adobe Scan or Acrobat," said Bobby Berk, interior designer, founder of Bobby Berk and member of the Fab 5 of Queer Eye. “Now Adobe Sign allows me to sign off on contracts and presentations in seconds. I can focus on the creative process, not the paperwork.”

Availability

New Adobe Document Cloud tools and services in Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Reader and Adobe Sign are available now. Visit www.adobe.com/go/documentcloud to update or download.

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