Hello! My name is Jeremy with the Rentec development team and today we’re going to talk about the sweet updates Rentec Direct is making to our electronic signature offering. The new signature platform will be rolling out to Rentec Direct clients this week.
What are Electronic Signatures?
Electronic Signatures are digital signatures that people can make online! Rentec Direct offers the ability to create custom forms that can be sent to tenants or owners. When sending these forms to owners and tenants you can request Electronic Signatures from the recipients.
Didn’t know Rentec Direct could do that? Yes, it can! I was pretty excited when I found out too. You get to go green by having a paperless office, provide your owners and tenants the convenience of electronic signatures, and improve the legal legitimacy of your agreements, all free with any current Rentec Pro or PM plan!
If you aren’t already using electronic signatures, it’s super easy. Check out our custom forms & signatures webinar we did just a few months ago for a full overview of how to use the system.
Say Hello to HelloSign
We’ve recently made some updates to this very great electronic signature feature to make it even more very great! Now we integrate with HelloSign to facilitate the electronic signature process. Our integration with HelloSign gives you quite a bit of information about where your documents are in the signature process. HelloSign also sends you an email every step of the way. It’s very nice to be kept in the loop, but if you find it’s too much you can create an email filter to help move those messages where you want them. For me, I am content looking at the progress of the document inside Rentec Direct, so I filter all those emails into a new Electronic Signatures email folder I created.
This update means that you will not need to generate an API key to start accepting signatures as before. You will have better visibility into where your document is at in the signing process. And, the requested signers will be very much kept in the loop as to what they are being requested to sign and when they need to sign it. Win, win, and win! Another, more personal win, is that I started a sentence with “And”, high five!
Our integration with HelloSign gives us more information about where a document is at in the signing process. And (win), since we have it, we’re passing that information on to you in the form of a new and improved document signing detailed status page! (NIDSDSP for short). This page will help you keep track of what forms you’ve sent out as well as inform you on the time of the signatures. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – and so, since I’m sure you all don’t want to read a thousand words I’ve included an amazing picture of the NIDSDSP below to save our collective brains. No need to thank me, you are very welcome.
What of the previous Electronic Signature solution Rentec offered?
No worries! All signature requests you’ve sent using the older solution will still be available to be viewed. The status of those requests can still be seen and any currently pending signature requests can be finished up. The improvements we’ve made with HelloSign will take effect on any new requests that are sent out. The previous integration we had, while we’re still connected to them for all previously issued documents, just didn’t have the abilities we needed in order to grow with us and allow us to continue to offer electronic signatures free.
Sign Me Up!
There isn’t any need to sign up for the new electronic signature request feature. You are already signed up! Throw up those Rock On hand signs because you are ready to rock. Plus, signatures are still included with your Pro or PM subscription, and available at no cost to you. This means you can send out as many documents as you need within reason, of course.**
What else?
Of course, you just had to ask that. As if the peace of mind that you get from knowing that the recipients of your signature requests would know exactly what and when they need to sign wasn’t enough. Well, I have good news. We’re planning on improving the electronic signature interface even more! This new integration with HelloSign is opening up the door to many future improvements which were not possible previously.
Soon you’ll be able to resend signature requests, delete sent signature requests, and potentially download the in progress signature request itself. In addition to this, our new improved interface will allow you to easily send a test document out! That’s right, we’ve added a “Send Test” button to allow the sending of testing documents! It’s awesome, I know and it’ll help ensure you never have an expense related to too many signatures.
** Electronic signatures: $2.50/ea if the signature count exceeds 15% of property count. (IE…
I have sent my first HelloSign document today and initially it looks to be identical to DocuSign. I am not happy about the change from unlimited to 15% of property count documents per month. Although it is described as a situation that will never happen I do not believe that is true long term. It is possible in a month to exceed that number pretty easy. For instance with 20 properties that is only 3 per month. For someone like my self with 12 active college rentals my spring turnover will likely have you guessed it 12 documents. That adds $22.50 to my turnover month that wasn’t there with DocuSign without adding any benefit over what DocuSign provided. I could easily see progress in DocuSign. Also could delete a request and resend. For me this seems like a pretty big takeaway that is being glossed over with a very positive introduction article.
Hi John. The 15% actually wasn’t related to the changeover to HelloSign, it’s been part of our terms of service for a while. Hellosign was a great move for us and you because they don’t have the premium pricing that DocuSign commanded, plus they have more features that we can work with. Electronic signatures aren’t free for us either. If somebody paying $40/m for their subscription but costs us $60 in electronic signatures, it just doesn’t work for anybody because you want us to be around long term and we wouldn’t if we priced our product below our cost. But instead of taking an approach of raising rates on everybody to accommodate the few who use a lot of signatures, we believe our approach is a lot fairer. Also, there’s a very good chance since we handle this manually, that somebody would have to go over their 15% allotment numerous months before it’s going to trigger any overage. I can’t promise it’ll be that way forever, but that’s how we’re handling it today.
Thank you Brentnie, appreciate your response. The approach sounds reasonable and as you expected I had no idea that the 15% policy was in place already.
How do I cancel a hellow sign sent by mistake?
Hi Dan, unfortunately, there currently isn’t a cancel option. It works just like an email (because it is an email) …once it’s sent, it’s not possible to un-send it. The best way to address this would be to send out a secondary email to the recipient explaining that the first email was sent in error and to please disregard it. At your request, our support team can then remove the pending “waiting for signature” request from your list. That said, a cancel option is coming very soon! It will not un-send the original email request, but it will prevent any future actions with the signature request to be completed.
Good Morning Dan,
We just deployed a feature that will allow you to request cancellation of a sent Signature Request.
From the Detailed Status page of a Pending Signature Request you will now see a “Cancel this Request” button. Clicking on this will request a cancellation of the sent signature request. Once the request is canceled, the signature request can be found in the “Canceled” signature requests area of the ESigning Status page.
HelloSign is not user friendly. DocuSign was much easier to use. Currently I am unable to execute new leases through HelloSign. I am spending hours of my time trying to get this new system to function properly. It is costing me the ability to rent units. Between HelloSign and the renters insurance option still is not usable, I have to seriously look into a different service altogether. Not acceptable.
Hi Joe, thank you for your valuable feedback as we love hearing from our clients. It appears you were able to connect with our Success Team this morning regarding your experience with HelloSign. As this is a new feature release and many clients have reported HelloSign as working seamlessly, our Client Success and Development teams are reviewing the details you provided from your experience and will reach back out to you soon.
As our clients have reported positive experiences with the renter’s insurance options, please feel free to contact the Success Team by email, phone, or chat to discuss your unique situation with that feature as well.
I hate to complain but Hello Sign is clearly NOT an upgrade. We specialize in College Rentals and will have over 80 lease/guarantor contracts going out in a 45 days period. This will substantially increase our invoice cost. Hello Sign creates too many emails clogging up our inbox and the signed documents are NOT accessible at the HelloSign website as they were using the DocuSign website. Learning a new process (that’s unnecessary) is not good for the consumer. The beneficiary of bringing in Hello Sign must be RentecDirect. DocuSign is superior to Hello Sign in every way. It’s much more established, user friendly and proven. It seems the only reason companies typically make changes is to improve their bottom line. I strongly suggest Rentec admit they made a mistake as moving back to Docusign would be wise decision. We have been happy with Rentec for the last two years however this change is already forcing us to look at other alternatives. We’d be very grateful if Rentec transitioned back to DocuSign.
Good Afternoon Claude!
Thank you for your comment. I understand your concerns about cost. Actually, Brentnie D went into some detail above in regards to cost. Basically, the move to HelloSign did not have any affect on the cost of Electronic Signatures. The pricing is the same as it was before the move. I’m going to go ahead and drop that link in here for reference: https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/new-feature-hellosign/#comment-102172
Also – I hear you regarding other aspects of the HelloSign move. I totally agree that learning a new process can be frustrating. I was working on addressing some of the points you brought up and got a little carried away! I actually ended up writing a blog post to address some of these points. I’ll go ahead and drop a comment here when we’ve got that posted. Hopefully it will help to answer some outstanding questions as well as alleviate some frustrations.
Until next week!
Good Afternoon Claude! I hope you are having a wonderful day. As promised, here is a link to that blog article which should answer some of the great questions you brought up. Hopefully it alleviates some frustrations.
https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/hellosign-electronic-signatures/
Rentec will not change based on our feedback as the move was done to re-establish a buried pricing structure while moving to a platform to reduce cost and possibly a security concern. My take is DocuSign is a better product so we are now subscribing to a service that provided less benefit than before if focusing on electronic documents. For our business that is a big part of the value proposition. Regardless the workflow Rentec provides has improved our customer service and cash flow with payment automation and tenant portal functions. It’s a good system but I still am not happy with this particular change and the continued positive spin responses we receive. Let’s work on addressing the feedback and provide solutions.
Hi John, many of us here at Rentec come from the property management world and understand the need for tools that work and work well. I am wondering if perhaps you weren’t aware of what is available with a HelloSign account that makes it a choice option for our clients? You can use HelloSign within Rentec without a HelloSign account but creating an account comes with benefits you might not have known. Jeremy just posted another blog outlining how to signup and navigate around HelloSign for notification and copy options (that were not available within DocuSign) as well as document status here: https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/hellosign-electronic-signatures/
Thank you for your kind words about our workflow and automation features. We hope that once you review the article and navigate the options you’ll find HelloSign more comfortable to use with time.