It’s really happening. Another year has passed in the blink of an eye and soon we will greet 2023. A lot of work has been done in 2022 and we can call it the year when Agrello platform evolved dramatically to further meet e-signing and contract management needs. We can highlight with certainty, that documents e-signed with Agrello can be considered legally equivalent to Docusign in all cases and exceed Docusign’s e-signature compliance levels in the Baltics region. In addition, our contract management features already meet the needs of small teams, but enhancing the team features to comply with the needs of larger teams will be one of our main goals for 2023.
Join us for an overview of the most notable advances in our product features, where we'll try to cover all major updates related to signing, document creation, and collaboration for teams.
1. Enhancements to digital signing
Over the year we made quite a few impactful enhancements to the signing flow and methods on Agrello platform - introducing qualified signatures, PDF native signatures, and loginless signing.
Qualified e-signatures for the Baltics region
Qualified electronic signatures have the same legal status in the EU as real handwritten signatures, according to the eIDAS Regulation. This is the highest possible legal recognition for electronic signatures. At the beginning of the year, our main focus was integrating Smart-ID and Mobile-ID onto Agrello platform, to enable nearly 4 million Smart-ID and Mobile-ID users in the Baltics to give qualified e-signatures on Agrello platform. Read more about qualified e-signatures here.
Introduction of PDF native signatures
Using PDF document format makes it simpler for you to define where the signature visual appearances will be. You don’t need to designate the signature places with specific {{sig_}}-tags anymore. Simply open the file in editing mode and just draw where you want to put the signatures.
Secondly, now the Qualified Electronic Signatures given with Smart-ID or Mobile-ID are also natively supported inside the PDF file. It will give you the possibility to meet the highest electronic signing standards.
Loginless signing
The core of loginless signing was to provide the ability to sign a document without logging in or creating an account especially for it. This is an important update, mostly directed to those who receive an invitation to sign, but don’t have an Agrello account yet. Now you can be sure that the people you invite to sign will not run into any issues and that the document gets signed on time. It’s possible to use Agrello signature, Smart-ID, or Mobile-ID to sign without logging in.
2. More convenience for contract creators
Agrello templates
Another important improvement that makes it a lot more convenient to create contracts and reduce human error is Agrello templates. Since most contracts are still prepared on Microsoft Word, then our solution will help you take the existing templates to the next level with a simple mark-up language using curly brackets. All of the fields you mark inside the Word document will appear as fillable fields after uploading it to Agrello platform. These fields can be filled by the contract creator or assigned to the counterparty for filling. This reduces the time to create new contracts and also the time spent on e-mailing the document back and forth to collect the information.
Bulk-creation of documents
Bulk creation is handy when you have the same document template where a few parameters change for each signer. After you have uploaded a template, you can use it to automatically bulk-create multiple documents out of it. Furthermore, by importing data from Microsoft Excel, dynamic fields can be pre-filled for each document. This significantly reduces the time needed to create repetitive documents. Whether you need thousands of customers to accept updated terms or hundreds of employees to sign off on a new employee code of conduct, bulk creation provides a seamless solution for companies of any size. Read more about how to use this awesome feature to your advantage here.
Custom notes and document reminders
In a hectic world, we need digital tools to support us and make our lives easier, which is why we introduced custom notes and reminders feature. Custom notes enable you to add a message before sending out the invitation to sign. This reduces confusion and gives your counterparty a quick overview of what and why they have to sign. By setting reminders to yourself about important obligations or deadlines that arise from the contract, you will never miss anything important and business will go smoothly.
3. Team collaboration
Agrello's most important collaboration feature is called team spaces, which practically means a digital workspace where your team can work together on documents and contracts. This year we introduced the shared team templates feature. Next year spaces will go through a bigger makeover, but we’ll keep you posted on that.
Better overview for everyone
It's important to make sure your team is on the same page. By inviting all colleagues involved in contract preparation to your Agrello team space, you can ensure that everyone has access to shared templates and an overview of relevant contracts. It’s important to get contracts signed on time, thus seeing the contracts by their signing status gives the whole team an overview of which contracts are already signed and which need a little nudge.
Team templates
Earlier this year we introduced Agrello templates and since this feature was very well received, our next step was to introduce shared templates for teams. One or more members of your team space can prepare and upload templates to the space. Afterwards every member of the space with editor rights can use that template to create new contracts. For example, the templates can be prepared by your team's lawyer or legal assistant, and later the sales team can proceed with contract creation without getting further help from a lawyer, thus saving time for everyone. Having a designated place to store important templates and the ability to instantly create contracts from them saves a lot of time, as it’s no longer necessary to look through different folders to find the right contract template.
These were the highlights of our year. Most of all, we’d like to thank our amazing team for always pushing through the ups and downs and for their endless contribution to make e-signing and contract management easier for everyone. Our mission continues next year!
We wish everyone a peaceful Christmas time and a happy new year!
