Simplify And Streamline Employee Timesheets With E-Signatures
Posted: 1 mth ago
Read time: 5 mins
Timesheets are a critical part of workforce management, ensuring employees are compensated accurately and companies maintain compliance with labour regulations. However, traditional timesheet processes often involve cumbersome paperwork, time-consuming manual approvals, and the potential for errors or delays. E-signature platforms such as ours offer a modern solution that simplifies and accelerates this essential administrative task. Though many people in the recruitment and staffing industry might be aware of what e-signatures are, there are quite a few people who have been asking what are e-signatures and how they work.
E-signatures, or electronic signatures, are a digital equivalent of handwritten signatures, enabling individuals to sign documents online securely and legally. They leverage encryption technology to verify the signer's identity and provide a tamper-proof record of the transaction. E-signatures are legally recognised in most countries, including the United States under the ESIGN Act, the European Union under the eIDAS Regulation, and the UK under the UK eIDAS.
Over time e-signature platforms have broadened the scope and scale of what they do, and today, platforms such as ours offer a broad set of functionalities that facilitate remote transactions holistically. For human resource professionals this has meant that documents such as timesheets can be filled and signed remotely on any device, at anytime. It also means that secondary documents (such as proof of right to work, copy of ID, and proof of address) can be collected simultaneously while the primary documents are being filled and signed, and legally required documentation (such as GDPR disclaimers, and Terms of Reference) can be delivered at the same time as the request to fill and sign.
Getting your timesheets filled and signed is a quick and easy process that can be done in 4 steps:
Timesheets generally require a supervisor or another third party to witness the signature of the applicant, a witness that may not be known at the point when the timesheet is dispatched from our platform. In such cases, our platform facilitates the "sign with a witness" method that allows the details of the witness to be supplied by the applicant.
The recipient can fill and sign the document by opening up a link (that will be sent by email, text message or WhatsApp) to our platform that will start a signing session on any device.
You can highlight the different areas of the timesheet that should be filled by each recipient by dragging and dropping a colour-coded box onto the document at the area/areas that should be edited. A colour is assigned to each recipient making it easy for you to identify who should do what. Furthermore, each box has a limited role to play in the editing process. For example, we have a date box that only allow dates to be entered, a time box that only allows the time to be entered, an email box that only allow emails and so on. The entire workflow is simple and is built to minimise errors.
The best thing about our platform is that the entire workflow from steps 1 to 4 can be saved as a template. With the workflow saved as a template, you don't need to repeat the process, you only need to change the recipient (by entering a new email, name, and telephone) and then send. This is particularly helpful for documents that have many separate sections that need to be filled and signed such as timesheets. The initial template creation may take a few minutes, but using the template to dispatch the timesheet will only take a second.
Importantly, you can create an external link to your template which allows your timesheets to be filled and signed by the applicant without your direct participation. All you need to do is share the link to your template in an email, text message, on a website, or on social media. The applicant will then be able to add his/her contact details for the e-signature request to be dispatched to him/herself and his/her supervisor.
Click the open template link hyperlink to see an example of how applicants can fill out a timesheet template independently.
Here are some of the reasons why you should switch from paper based timesheet management to digital with DocEndorse.
Using an E-signature platform such as ours also comes with the added benefit that we integrate with many of the existing applications that you already use in your business. One such application is Office 365. With our platform you can dispatch documents for e-signatures directly from within Microsoft Word, PowerPoint,Outlook, and Excel. All of this can done at no additional cost, you only need to connect your Microsoft App with DocEndorse.
E-signatures revolutionise timesheet management by making it faster, more secure, and less prone to errors. They empower employees with convenient, accessible tools while streamlining administrative processes for HR and management teams. By adopting e-signature technology, organisations can save time and resources, improve accuracy, and enhance the overall efficiency of their workforce management systems.
It's time to embrace e-signatures and take the hassle out of timesheet processing.