CaseWare International, traditionally an international annual accounts specialist based in Toronto, has grown over the past ten years into a full practice support provider in the accountancy market. They support accountants worldwide from their open platform CaseWare Cloud, enabling accountants to execute all their engagements from start to finish. CaseWare Netherlands, with 65 employees across four Dutch offices, is the Dutch distributor of CaseWare International.
The platform is distributed worldwide and tailored by each distributor to the needs of the accountancy market in their respective country. "Think global, act local has always been our starting point," says Richard Schiphorst, Managing Director at CaseWare Netherlands. The transition from a desktop platform to the collaborative Cloud platform provides the company with the opportunity to expand its range of solution types.
Quality and reliability
Since March of this year, CaseWare Netherlands has been using the online signature from ValidSign. The reason for this was that the process around signing processing agreements was suboptimal, as documents had to be drafted, printed, signed, scanned, emailed, and then manually archived afterwards. CaseWare Netherlands realised that the signing process could indeed be made more efficient.
Schiphorst: "We stand for quality and reliability and want to project this to our customers as well. With ValidSign, we can deliver on this, because all necessary steps are successfully completed in a single action and the documents remain accessible in the ValidSign portal after signing. Additionally, the option to set a signing order makes it nearly impossible to send incorrect documents or to specify wrong addressees."
Partnership with ValidSign
CaseWare Netherlands initially came to ValidSign through references about the solution from their own customer base. In January 2019, the integration with ValidSign from the CRM and document management system "AuditCase" was established. What makes the combination of ValidSign and AuditCase so powerful? The entire process for an accounting firm -- from creating the document, the internal approval process, status information, and archiving -- is handled in one go. For both CaseWare Netherlands and its clients, they are done within a single action and the rest runs automatically.
"ValidSign's signing solution was the missing link in our workflow optimisation," says Schiphorst.
The integration with AuditCase is just the beginning of the collaboration between ValidSign and CaseWare Netherlands. CaseWare offers a complete solution for accounting firms, where firms can determine for themselves which sub-apps they want to use depending on the engagement. Such apps include the PBC+ app for standardised document requests and the WWFT+ app for managing the entire Anti-Money Laundering registration for clients. "By integrating ValidSign's solution with these as well, the process could be fully optimised. I am convinced that this will be realised in the near future," outlines Schiphorst.
Time savings
All outgoing processing agreements and commercial documents within CaseWare Netherlands are currently submitted for digital signing via ValidSign. Because the solution integrates seamlessly with AuditCase, ValidSign delivered 20 to 40 minutes of time savings per document on the handling of the total signing process within just one month of deployment.
"We chose to handle the deployment of ValidSign through a web session, which could be scheduled immediately after signing the proposal. And quite soon after the deployment of ValidSign, we had customised the various communication materials with our own branding and our employees were ready to start working with it," says Richard.
More ValidSign in the future
For CaseWare Netherlands, digital signing has proven to be an inevitable step. It has become an indispensable part of the processes within CaseWare Netherlands. If it were up to Richard, the solution will not only be used for processing agreements and commercial documents but will soon also be applied across the entire HR department for, among other things, signing employment contracts.
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