Reduce the chase for client signatures
Unsigned documents hold up lodgements and payments. Electronic signing and automatic reminders turn the signature chase into a background process.
Every practice knows the bottleneck. The work is done, the return is ready, the engagement is agreed, and the only thing standing between you and lodging or invoicing is a client signature that has not arrived. So begins the chase: a reminder email, then another, then a phone call, while a deadline creeps closer. The work took skill. The signature is taking your patience.
Signatures hold up more of a practice than people realise. Engagement letters gate the start of work. Authority forms gate lodgement. Approvals gate the next stage. When any of these sits unsigned, the whole job stalls, and the delay is almost never about the client refusing. It is about friction and forgetfulness.
Remove the friction first
The biggest cause of signature delay is a signing process that is harder than it should be. If a client has to print a document, sign it by hand, scan it and email it back, you have built four opportunities for the task to be postponed. Most people do not have a printer within easy reach, so the document waits for a more convenient moment that never quite comes.
Electronic signing collapses all of that into a few taps. The client opens the document on their phone, reviews it, signs and is done, with no printer, scanner or attachment involved. You receive a completed, dated document with a clear audit trail. Removing the friction alone recovers a large share of the signatures that would otherwise drift.
- Any device. Clients sign from a phone, tablet or computer, wherever they are.
- A clean record. Each signature is captured with a timestamp and trail, which matters for authorities and engagements.
- Immediate progression. The moment a client signs, the next step can begin.
Let reminders carry the chase
Even with easy signing, some clients will still forget. The mistake is treating each forgotten signature as a task on your list. Manual chasing is slow, easy to lose track of, and quietly demoralising. Automatic reminders take it off your plate: when a document is outstanding, the client is nudged on a sensible schedule until they sign, without you keeping a mental tally of who is outstanding.
Finye handles engagement letters and approvals with e-signing built in, and follows up outstanding signatures automatically. Once a client signs, post-signature steps run on their own, so a completed signature immediately moves the job forward rather than landing back on someone's to-do list.
Make signing part of the flow
Signatures should not feel like a separate errand bolted onto the relationship. When the document to sign lives in the same portal where the client uploads records and approves work, signing becomes just another quick task in a familiar place rather than a special event requiring its own email thread. The more signing fits the natural rhythm of working with you, the less it needs chasing at all.
Electronic signing is well established and accepted for most business documents in Australia, as reflected in general guidance from business.gov.au, and keeping proper signed records supports the obligations the Tax Practitioners Board places on registered agents.
Turn a bottleneck into background
The goal is for signatures to stop being something you actively manage. When signing is effortless for the client and reminders run themselves, the signature chase fades into a background process that resolves on its own. Deadlines stop being threatened by paperwork, and your team spends its energy on work that needs judgement rather than on nagging. Our guides walk through setting up e-signing and reminders, and you can see how it fits the practice on our pricing page.