Sign Easy: An Option to Sign PDFs on the Go

Kiss your fax machine (if you haven’t already) and scanner goodbye

You ever have a situation where an idea sounds good and then once you see it in action it’s better than you thought? Well that’s the feeling I had when I stumbled across Sign Easy (www.getsigneasy.com). If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you know I travel for work…a lot…~~probably~~ too much (read more about that here).
So basically the more things I can figure out how to do from my iPhone or iPad the better, and now I can add one more option to my mobile tool belt – signing PDF documents.

The story goes something like this…because of all the time I spend in transit I don’t always have access to a printer, scanner, or fax either because I’m sitting in the airport or because of some difficult accessing the client network and I don’t have scanner or fax at home, so even I’m able to print some time sensitive documents at home, I have to pay FedEx to scan/fax the docs for me or wait until I go back to a client site or my office. In the case of the former, I try to refrain from printing personal docs while at the client. It’s not that anyone would get upset, but I don’t need my client to know I’m trying to close a deal to get new tenants.

Having been familiar with Genius Scan already, I thought the app store might have something to solve my problem so I did a basic search and just like that, Sign Easy sat before me with 4.5 star rating and my favorite price: free. So of course I download it to check it out and this is what I see:

Home Screen

My Signature & Initials

You can choose to store your signature and initials for future reference which is nice because you can then just copy it into the appropriate fields instead of actually signing multiple times, but those of us a little less trusting of technology may be hesitant because of the risk our signature could fall into the wrong hands. It wasn’t a problem for me but I can respect the cautiousness there because a signature is power thing.

My Documents

Sign Easy saves the original and signed versions of every document you sign for easy reference. The premium version offers integration with the various cloud storage systems that people love to discuss (Dropbox, Box, Drive, etc). I weighed in on Box vs. Dropbox here but Google Drive deserves its own post since it’s little bit of a different beast.

Documents

Once you choose “My Documents” the below screen appears, showing the list of documents already stored within the Sign Easy app.

Pages

After you select a document to sign, you’ll be brought to a screen asking you which page of the document you want to sign. This is a jump or link functionality because once you select a page, you can still scroll through the rest of the document or come back to this page to jump to the next page requiring your signature.

Once you select a page, you can choose the type of signature or text you want to insert. Again, you have a nice breadth of options here that should address any sort of signature need you might have to turn time-sensitive documents around faster than if you had to print them out, sign them, and scan/fax them back to the recipient. The fact that you can do this from anywhere where you get service on your phone makes If you used the saved signature option, you can re-size that signature to fit the available space on each signature page.

Summary

All in all, this app does exactly what I wanted it to do, so from that standpoint I recommend the app 100%..BUT there was one thing that bothered me. Being the frugal guy that I am, when I went back into the app to grab these screenshots for your viewing pleasure, I was less than thrilled to find out the app only gives you 3 free documents to sign plus 1 extra when the app actually lets you know this “free” app isn’t actually free after all. I’m all for selling a service or app but cases that can be perceived as bait-and-switch (giving the benefit of the doubt here) simply don’t sit well with me.