One of the goals of companies that offer products or services is to close as many deals as possible. For this, in many cases, it is necessary for the parties involved to sign a contract and this process must be fast and practical, which reinforces the importance of entering the era of electronic documents.
In order for you to understand how to do this, we have produced this article dedicated to the topic. We invite you to read it until the end, as we will go through the following points:
Shall we go ahead?
What are electronic documents?
As its name suggests, Electronic documents are documents that can be stored and accessed on various types of electronic devices., with cell phones and computers being the most common, even used for sign them.
Therefore, instead of business managers following the procedure of keeping their documents in cabinets and having to leaf through them every time they need to find a specific file, Electronic Document Management (also known by its acronym GED) allows you to quickly locate them with a simple search.
In this way, business management becomes more practical and faster when electronic documents replace physical ones, as we will see later.
What are the characteristics of electronic documents?
When it comes to electronic documents, we can classify them into two modules: capture and document management.
O capture accelerates the processes when using forms to record the information of people and companies that fall within the scope of your business.
On the other hand, document management refers to the technology by which GED is made so that you have files stored securely and access them whenever you need.
How to apply electronic documents in your company?
The practical part of the GED is not just to change the format of a document for another, as some steps must be taken before that. We list the main ones below.
- Inform employees about the change so that everyone knows that physical documents will be replaced by electronic ones.
- Hire the GED tool that best suits the administration of your business.
- Conduct internal training so that everyone can use it during their work routine.
What are the advantages of electronic documents?
Although some people tend to think that the only difference between electronic documents and physical is the format, the truth is that the GED has many other benefits.
Here are the most important ones so you can understand why entering the age of electronic documents is necessary.
Information Security
Let's imagine that you have your physical documents stored in your office cabinets and that they have important and confidential information about your business.
If more people besides you have the key, this shows that access to them is vulnerable. To get an idea, there are companies that dig through the garbage of their competitors for the purpose of finding important information from paper documents that are thrown away.
Therefore, by adopting electronic documents, you can control access to files that are open to all employees and to those that only you can access.
Ease of updating documents
When a customer hires a company's service, the business's interest is to keep it on the base from the renewal of the contract whenever the term ends.
If the contract is made with physical documents, it is necessary to send the printed file to the client and wait for him to send it back with the signature. In addition to having to deal with shipping costs, lead time is longer compared to electronic documents.
After all, in this situation, just send a new contract or even an amendment for the renewal to be done in just one click.
By the way, if you need to update your minutes, when using the GED, it becomes unnecessary to print several new minutes and get rid of the previous ones by throwing them in the trash. On the management platform electronic documents, you just need to upload a new file (usually in DOC or PDF format) to update it.
Agility in customer service
Until the beginning of the 00's, many calls were made over the phone and people were more willing to wait minutes or even hours on the line to answer a question or solve a problem.
However, nowadays, speed is essential. Therefore, many choose to be attended by WhatsApp or chat because, as a rule, they are tools in which communication takes place in a more agile way.
Thus, if the service involves sending documents, it will be much easier to do so if it is in electronic format. In addition, your subscription can be made at the same time via e-mail or WhatsApp.
Cost reduction
As you can see, issuing physical documents requires several costs, such as: toner, paper, envelopes, carrier or courier, among others. As much as they seem to be cheap values, if the company generates many documents per month, a big difference will be seen in the billing.
Of course, the GED also requires investment regarding the contracting of the electronic document tool. However, will certainly be a lower cost than the amounts required in the document management Physical.
Rugged
Some organizations need contracts to be signed by several parties, one of which is the manager or owner of the business. If you have a full schedule and appointments in different places, would you have enough time to be in the office each time a new physical document is generated in order to sign it? Certainly not.
Therefore, this is another difference presented by the electronic documents: you can sign them anywhere as long as you have a cell connected to the internet.
What's more, the subscription takes just a few seconds as it is done with just one click. So, even if you have many commitments throughout the day and need to sign the documents generated by the company's employees, it is possible to do this through the GED.
Use of physical space in the company
The organization of electronic documents is carried out in the cloud, which saves you a lot of space that would be dedicated to storing physical documents.
Some companies just need a locker, but others – such as accounting, for example – they even dedicate an entire room to store all their files, contracts and the like.
Document durability
Have you ever had the experience of picking up an old newspaper, but very carefully as time has made the paper very worn? Well, this is the same destination reserved for physical documents.
As much as it can take years for a printed document to be in this state, it is worth remembering that moisture, insects, fungi and bacteria can accelerate the process, in addition to being harmful to health.
Therefore, having documents stored electronically also has the advantage of not losing them over time.
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How does the legal validity of electronic documents work?
One of the biggest fears of those preparing to enter the era of electronic documents is the legal validation their. After all, physical documents signed at a notary's office, for example, generate more credibility for the parties.
This makes many wonder: do electronic documents also have legal validity? The answer is yes. Keep reading, as we’ll explain why next.
What makes an electronic document valid?
Let's imagine that you are in an informal setting – like a bar, for example – talking to a potential new business partner. During the chat, you make a work agreement and have a person who witnesses this pact.
As much as some may doubt, these verbal contracts have legal validity, as pointed out in the articles 104 e 107 of the Brazilian civil code.
Therefore, if an agreement made orally is valid by law, why with electronic documents would be different?
A Provisional Measure 2.200-2/2001, for example, does not restrict the means used to prove the authorship and integrity of electronic signatures.
In practical terms, when someone receives a file electronically and needs to log in to confirm their identity and sign it, it becomes legally valid.
What does Brazilian jurisprudence say about electronic documents?
The main example of jurisprudence that confirms the legal validity of electronic documents is the appeal (APC 20140111450486 of the 5th Civil Class of the Court of Justice of the Federal District and Territories). According to her, the contractual relationship excludes the need for a written document, making electronic signatures valid.
This means that signing an electronic document only requires proving the authenticity of the person who signed it. Therefore, although it is possible to collect signatures even in Microsoft Word, it is recommended to use a dedicated platform.
After all, it allows you to collect information such as: full name, email, phone number, even a copy of physical documents such as RG and CPF if necessary.
How can ZapSign help you enter the age of electronic documents?
ZapSign is a company that has a electronic signature and also digital. However, the platform It has a very important differential: simplicity.
Regardless of where you are, you can access the platform from your computer or cell phone to sign any electronic file in a few seconds.
Besides, ZapSign has several plans to meet the needs of your business, whether aimed at signing few or many documents per month.
To get to know them in detail and enter the era of electronic documents once and for all, stay with us and click here!
