Your electricians will be able to securely sign certificates from a mobile device, anywhere in the world. They won’t even need access to a printer (or even a pen for that matter) in order to sign, seal, and deliver your work.
What’s more, you and your customers are provided with an electronic certificate for your records when it’s complete.
What Are Digital Signatures?
Digital signatures are the paperless approach to signing off your work. For electrical certification, it refers to the act of adding a signature to certify the information on the certificate provides an accurate assessment of the electrical work conducted. This would typically include the signature of the person responsible for the inspection and testing. It would also include the signature of the qualified supervisor that reviews the completed document.
You can add digital – or electronic – signatures via a computer, laptop or device. They can be created from a scanned image or photo or can be drawn using your mouse or finger. With this approach to signing off your electrical certificates, you can reduce the need for paper and streamline your work.
Benefits of Digital Signatures
The benefit of the nearly instant transaction of switching to digital signatures is self-evident. It speeds up the process of filling in certificates, results in professional certificates every time and gives you the option to capture signatures on the go.
Let’s look into each of these benefits in more detail.
1. Capture signatures onsite
You can also get engineer’s and/or your designer’s signatures onsite with electrical certificate apps on your iOS or Android device. Being able to fill out your work as you go means you don’t have to worry about typing up the details at a later date. You can then finish up that job and move on to the next.
Being able to capture signatures electronically gives you the freedom to do it from anywhere. With offline apps, you can simply draw your engineer signatures directly onto your tablet or mobile device with your finger. There’s no need for any special equipment or pen for this, it’s as easy as that.
2. Get it right every time
With paper certificates, it can take a lot more manual input to fill out test results and customer details. It limits how you can complete them, resulting in extra steps like manual editing and postage. This older way of completing electrical test certificates also leaves certificate accuracy to chance due to having to manually input customer information.
This can be a headache for your customer and your electricians. Delaying the job completion and adding extra steps to the process can postpone payment and cause hold-ups for the other jobs you have lined up.
With digital certificates, you can clearly find the correct field which requires a signature. You can pull across customer details from your address book and insert a saved signature. This way, all your certificates are consistent, and your customers get a professional document every time.
3. Save time
You can save hours of creation time when using electrical certification software and digital signatures. You won’t need to wait for an engineer to get back from the site. Depending on the journey, it could be hours before the physical certificate gets back to the office. By ditching the paper certificates, you can send work back and forth between site and the office quickly and efficiently.
Effortlessly send filled-out electrical certificates to the qualifying supervisor for an electronic signature. They’ll be able to filter and find certificates send from the field in the office software. From there, they can accept them, add their signature and finally complete it instantly. You can create and edit your electronic certificates in half the time.
Benefits of Digital Signatures in the NICEIC Cert Software
Once you have set up the functionality of digital signatures on the desktop software, you can apply the electrician’s signature in a few clicks. Speedier certificate completion results in speedier payments for your business.
You can also get engineers’ and/or your designer’s signatures onsite with Clik Cert Electrical on your iOS or Android device. You can then finish up that job and move on to the next.
If you are using templates within your NICEIC Cert Software, this will save you even more time. You can create a template for your engineer with their signature already added. Then all they need to do is add in the test results and circuit details and they’re done. They can then either complete the certificate there and then (with Cloud Numbering) or send it back to the office for final checks.
How to Use Digital Signatures in the NICEIC Cert Software
Whether you’re a small or large business, you can benefit from combining electronic signatures with your NICEIC Cert Software. It will turn the historic hassle of manually signing certificates into a streamlined, paperless, customer-focused, user experience.
There are a couple of ways you can use digital signatures in the NICEIC Cert Software. To make the process quicker, you can create your own digital user signature to use time and time again. You can find the signature setup by going to ‘view’ in the top menu of the software and selecting ‘signature setup’. From there, you can draw your signature or load a pre-saved image.
To give other users access to insert your signature onto certificates, tick their name on the ‘sharing’ tab in the signature setup screen.
Once on the certificate, select ‘use my signature’ (feature will be added in update 59) from the options icon found next to the signature field box to automatically add your saved signature. You can also load a signature another user has given you access to or capture a new one using the drawing tool.
And that’s it! Embed legally binding e-signatures within your certificates in just a few steps. Complete more work and get paid quicker left, right and centre with the NICEIC Cert Software.
Haven’t tried NICEIC Cert Software yet? Download a demo to see how it can help your business.
This post was first published in February 2020 and has been edited with updated information.