Many companies have already switched or switching and implementing paperless document workflow with signature adoption. When employees or clients fill out and sign their documents, like contracts, offer letters, agreements, I9, W4 forms, upload their licenses or other documents, they can sign all the needed papers from home using a computer or even a phone.

Pandadoc

While working with such documents from home might save trees, time and money, it also can save lives. Yes, online document workflows saves lives – by minimizing human exposure to COVID. With electronic signatures there is no need to force our clients and employees to risk being exposed to COVID while using public transport or visiting public places like your company office. So if you have an Internet connection – you are ready to go.

Online documents to sign

There are a few decent providers who offer web-based services for creating and signing documents online. Docusing became defacto the mainstream provider for signature adoption. However, more and more companies and organizations find Docusign services less sustainable for their business due to high/increased pricing and start searching for a more-affordable but still reliable alternative.

PandaDoc though might be not so sophisticated at the moment, but definitely gets its momentum considering the pricing differences between the two.

Though, switching to PandaDoc from Docusing is a pretty straightforward process, still it includes a few steps before a company can start signing its documents with the new provider, these steps are:

  1. Create a list of your Docusign Templates and Convert them to Pandadoc templates. PandaDoc company might even help you to convert your DocuSign templates to PandaDoc templates. Just try to ask them!
  2. Download existing documents from Docusing, so your company can still use them after your Docusign subscription is terminated. Beware if you have many documents, it might be not so easy to convince DocuSing to provide you all the documents unless you buy their desktop application (which is NOT that cheap :). Or you can use your existing API access to download the documents through the API. Does NOT mater if you purchased their costly application or downloading the documents using DocuSign API it would take some time till you get all the documents to your hard drive, so make sure you have enough time before your subscription expires!!!
  3. If your company uses an application to implement certain document workflow (e.g.: one of our client uses specific on-boarding workflow), make sure this application can support PandaDoc or perhaps it needs some extra module developed for this purpose.

Pandadoc provides RESTful API in two flavors :

Public API should cover most of the organization needs like:

  • listing templates, folders, documents, etc;
  • creating documents from templates;
  • sending documents to be signed by users;
  • sharing documents with a unique link;
  • downloading the signed documents.

We also provide a free of charge python library which wraps API calls into python classes. Just grab the code and check our manual on how to use it. More detailed information on the library can be found here.

Online documents to sign

Ok, so we have public API covered, why not to stop here?! Because, some features like downloading the Uploads from the documents are NOT covered by the public API yet but can be accessible through the private API only! So if you do need to be able to download this certificate or driving license or passport your user/employee/client uploaded, you would need the access to the private API (at least at the moment of writing this article). Also there is no API KEY access to the private API so your application would need to implement Oauth2.0 to gain access to the private API and be able to download Uploaded files/documents.

And when you got these points covered, you can save the money for your company and electronically sign documents with your clients and employees.