The Role of Quik! vs. E-Sign Solutions
Our goal with Quik! enterprise forms automation is to help you improve your workflow and processes that depend on forms. Quik! is the forms solution, which means everything needed to fill out, complete,validate and submit a form for processing should be done with the Quik! platform and not relegated to the e-sign platform. The primary job of the e-sign vendor is to sign documents, not fill them out and perform forms work. By using Quik! to display and fill out the form completely before it reaches DocuSign or SIGNiX the signing event becomes a controlled, single step in your workflow. If you aren't able to complete the form before progressing to e-signing then the common solution is to design a different or improved workflow around the form.
Sample workflow improvements are:
- Giving the user the ability to save the form and reload it at a later date
- Email or share it securely with others before routing it for completion
- Review and approve the form before starting the e-sign process
With an improved workflow, completing the form becomes a much easier and less stressful task, and the e-sign vendor's platform can do what it does best: capture signatures (not fill out forms).
Challenges To Using E-Sign Tools For Forms
Customers often ask if Quik! forms can remain fillable in DocuSign or SiGNIX. No, Quik! does not allow users to make changes to forms in either DocuSign or SIGNiX. Once a form has been submitted for e-signature, it can only be signed by its recipients. We have a few important reasons for this:
- If fields were fillable, then which fields should be fillable for which signers in the e-sign world? Managing which fields a user can/should complete while e-signing is a very difficult thing to manage. Although signing roles are straight-forward, it's not usually clear which signing party should have the authority to change or enter data on the form. By filling out the form prior to signing, all relevant parties have the opportunity to work on the form before committing to the end result of a signed form (i.e. opening a new account, changing beneficiaries, etc.).
- Controlling when someone can fill in a field vs. when they sign makes compliance and legal enforcement very risky. What happens if one person signs and another adds more info to the form afterwards? Compliance is far easier when the only thing someone can do in the e-sign process is sign a completed document, not change it between signatures.
- Allowing users to fill out forms in an e-sign solution goes against the overall philosophy and methodology of enterprise forms automation. DocuSign and SIGNiX are the signature products and Quik! is the forms product. If the e-sign vendor becomes the forms product, then the user experience degrades and it becomes confusing for the user to know which step should be taken to fill out the form. In addition, any validations that were present in the forms automation process won't/can't be carried over to the e-sign process.
- Integrating forms automation deep into e-sign partner systems is not something the e-sign partners have easily facilitated or even made possible. To build out the capability would be at a very high cost and level of complexity.
Ultimately, transferring the work of filling out a form to the e-sign platform results in far less functionality, loss of control and increased risk.
Do Competitor Solutions Allow For Fillable Forms in DocuSign or SIGNiX?
It may be possible to fill out fields in DocuSign or SIGNiX when the form are generated in competitor solutions, but that is generally made possible because the competitor solutions are not actually integrated into DocuSign or SIGNiX. Instead, users can import a fillable form into DocuSign or SIGNiX but there’s no automation, no pre-defined signing roles, no regulation of who signs, etc. In other words, yes you can import and fill out a fillable form in DocuSign or SIGNiX, but then you lose all the ability to streamline and control your process that Quik! enables.