Sign at the Source — ActivateYour Built-In eSigning Powers.

Kylie: My name is Kylie Davis. It's great to be with you all here today. I'm here with Anita O'Connor from Forms Live, and we're going to be talking about electronic signatures and some of the really cool features that sit inside Forms Live that give you superpowers in this space. So, Anita, welcome. Great to see you again.

Anita: Thank you, Kylie, it's always good to be here with you.

Kylie: Yeah, no problems at all. So, let's kick off, one of the things that a lot of people don't realise is that Forms Live has its own inbuilt electronic signatures. So why were they built into Forms Live? What's the story there?

Anita: It absolutely made sense. You know, we have the ability for subscribers to connect DocuSign accounts to Forms Live. And that was all well and good, but what we were finding is one person would have a DocuSign license in an agency, but their workmates wouldn't. And they would use the one person's account, then there would be connection or disconnections — if they hadn't re-subscribed to use DocuSign. Efficiency is our nature. That's the whole point of the platform, that we want to improve efficiency for our subscribers. So, it made sense to build it in. By having it there, everyone in an agency or a business can use it immediately. It just made life easier. And the amount of forms that are getting signed in our platforms, because it's built in, is phenomenal, and we love it. I want people to be efficient.

Kylie: I can see the benefit of it, because we recently have purchased off the plan and the whole thing nearly fell over, because between our conveyancer and the real estate agent, and nobody had access to a DocuSign license. They did each have them in their office, but the people we were dealing with didn't have access to that license. And so I received something like 148 page document and got told, Oh, sign it. Can you photograph it and sign it on your phone? It was like, No! So, electronic signatures is one of the hidden gems inside Forms Live. So where do we find them? Are they easy to see? Or the reason they're hidden gem because people might not have noticed them.

Anita: I would love to know why people don't see it, or want to connect external or they're going through the one form guru in their office, because being built in, they are just simply available. I'm going to quickly share my screen.

[Identifying eSigning enabled forms demonstration]

Anita: Where electronic signing is, when you're looking at forms and you go to create in the top right-hand corner, create a new form, eSign. So, when you see that little label that says eSign, and take a look, almost every single form is set up for eSigning, for electronic signing. It's just there. In Forms Live, it's a two-step process. You create your form in a draft, finalise, and then the signing panel appears on the right-hand side. As simple as that, it is just there.

Kylie: So, let's talk about some of the specific features that are part of the signing package, because there's quite a few. You guys have set up some really flexible ways to use the signatures that you can't necessarily do with other platforms. Am I right?

Anita: Yes, because we are working for efficiency and recognising our time working or creating this platform, we've had our platforms available for over 15 years, and we love subscriber feedback. We have learned so much. So, a lot of these features were built because people would come to us and say, Hey, this is good, but I need, could you just have this available? So that's exactly what we did. Because I'm not a real estate agent. I admire the work that property managers do and conveyances and real estate agents, because they're just so busy and doing things, especially PMs, and I'll call them out specifically, because they're so document driven. And it was about efficiencies. We recognise people would say, I need this. And we went, you know what? That makes sense. So, we would do it, so we will continue to improve.

Kylie: Okay, so there's three that we're going to cover today, and then there's some extra things that are like a bonus awesomeness. But the first is Deferred Signing. Tell us about what Deferred Signing is and why you might use it.

Anita: So, I'll call out South Australia specifically, because there were a couple of scenarios that were repeated to us contracts. So, when a sales agent was going out and had a property for sale, they would go out and collect and promote the property, get the details from a potential purchaser. They would collect multiple contracts. They would get the potential purchaser to complete a contract, and they wanted it to have it signed, ready to present to their vendor, the person selling it. And what we found that was because we had it set up that you would sign it, and then the form is locked down, and you couldn't resend it. You couldn't say, okay, I've pitched this one. So we did, we set up what we call Deferred Signing. So, you've got this ability to go, okay, I've got these five potential buyers for this property, and I've got these five signed contracts, because we know that once someone signed something, there's a little bit more buy in. Present those to the vendor, and they would say, Great, Kylie, you're the winner. I want Kylie to be the winner. I’m Happy with the terms, etc. You as an agent, using Forms Live, can pick that contract — it has a Deferred Signing — I can then send that signed contract to you for signing. It has two different dates of when the purchaser scribes did that signing piece, and then you can sign it. And it made sense. It made sense. The switch, the other way we've done it again in South Australia, was the Form 1. So, the Form 1 is a disclosure statement that has to be presented when the property is being sold. The agent has to collect or conveyancer, collects all that information, puts to puts it together, the vendor signs it, and then it's displayed. The winning person, the purchaser, can then be sent that so again, deferred signing. And it opens the fields that you can put in that purchaser name, you can have them sign it. And there you go. There is the one form, Form 1 or the contract, signed by both parties at different times, and it's all collected into one place.

Kylie: That makes so much sense to me, because, often when you're either buying or selling, it’s hard to get everyone to sign at exactly the same time. That just creates so much more traffic in terms of the need to make phone calls. And are you ready yet? Or I've presented your offer, you said that it was going to be this. And as a buyer and the buyer and the seller says yes, and then you come back, and when it comes to actually signing the contract, they've changed a little bit. And so now you know, like that makes so much sense to me. So awesome. Deferred signing. Great opportunity. The second one signatures on PDFs. So, how does this make our lives easier?

Anita: again, we had, it's based on that same that same Subscriber Feedback. We love your feedback, by the way. When we had agencies, property managers and even sales agents, going well, this is great. The form is great. It works, but I want to add my renter document, a rental agreement or a tenancy agreement. And I've got a document that outlines how my agency works, where Anita is the contact for all the glorious things and maybe Riki, who's my form guru, she's the person who deals with the other stuff. When someone needs to be contacted and I want my tenant or my renter to sign that, or if it's a sales form and a marketing — you may have had a marketing document created externally or really pretty PDF, but I want my the person I'm sending it to, to sign it. I'm sure we all realise not everyone reads every single thing just because they're signing it, but we'll skip that bit. It's more about you've got that acknowledgement. So, you can attach your pretty PDF that you've had someone in your office design to one of our forms or a template and add signatures. When they go through the process of signing those spots on the form, on a contract, on a tenancy agreement, and we want them to sign that PDF, it flows right through. It's not separate documents. It's one single document when you've got their attention, right? When you've got their attention.

Kylie: Yeah, so you're not asking them to say, sign the tenancy agreement, and then later on, you send them an email with the policies of your company, because this is a great way to kind of lock in, or be open and transparent around what the policies are with your with your clients, right? So things, and I can see that that would work really well for marketing and for but even things like some of the apps that property managers are using now around how you collect your rent, how you report errors or issues, and all of that communication upfront and being able to say, Yeah, okay, I've read that. I acknowledge that. I've read that that's actually not having to send that as two separate emails and then hope that they that they get it right. That's a fantastic feature.

Anita: And I don't know about you, but I save, I save the documents I sign right. Anything I sign, I will then save it. I'll get a copy. I'll save it somewhere, because if I need to refer to it, that's the one I'm going to so a single PDF with those it's one document. So, you know, you've got their attention and they're going to keep it.

Kylie: When the client gets that through, because I'm just comparing it to things that I've so when the client gets that through, do they get it as an email with multiple attachments, or did they get through as a single document?

Anita: A single document, which, like I said, that's, that's the gotcha moment. That's the, you know, they're going to go back to that.

Kylie: I know part of your contract.

Anita: correct. Look at your contract. It was there.

Kylie: And so when you're setting that up, do you set that up as you set a signature on the PDF, and you set a signature on the form, or do you attach the create the attachment onto the form, so that it all goes off in one.

Anita: Second one, option B. So, in in the forms that live in, Forms Live, we've set out all the signatures exactly where they need to be. You don't have to think about that. You don't need to worry about it. They're all placed in the appropriate spots, right. With the PDF, when you add an attached PDF, and you have the option you take a look at and add those additional signatures, it leverages the signatures that are in the main form. If it's a client, it will appear as clients. So, clients will go from one to two to three. If it's a renter, right? They're signing the renter position in a tenancy agreement. And then it flows down to that attached document. They're signing it there. So, there's no you don't have to think too much about, okay, who's this person? We're leveraging those same signatures. And again, it's that one document and it gets sent out. You only have to worry about your attachment, not the main form, which is we want to keep some of those headaches out of your space.

Kylie: Yeah, I love it. Okay, and so the third one that we've got is our signable annexures. Now a slight question without notice, but what's the difference between an annexure and a signable PDF, or are they similar?

Anita: Similar. An attached PDF is that prettily designed someone in your office, whether it's a renter's guide for your agency. We've always had annexures available in most forms in Forms Live and you tick them; they appear as part of the form. And we had, we had this agency in Mornington Peninsula, and they used annexures with lots of additional details. You know that they wanted their own terms, their own tweak on things, which was cool, and it was in excess of three pages. But then we went down that extra step and went, it makes sense for them to sign off on that as well. You know, it's not just attached to the end, it is attached to the end and has that option to sign, so you can use a combination of both. And it's about choice, right? One agent, a certain agency may have some beautifully designed documents because they've got someone who's really cool at doing that, whereas others prefer to, let's pop it in the annexure and having that signed off. Either work, you could use them combination together or individually. So, choose your own adventure.

Kylie: It's flexible enough to work the way that you want it to look. We've had a really interesting comment. Carol has actually said that she's used it and she requested some additional spaces for more than two vendors, and you guys did that, so that was really helpful. But she's also asked, Can you just give us a quick demo on how to add a document to get it signed?

[demonstration — add signature fields to attached PDFs]

Anita: Sure. I am going to create a form. I'm going to use a sales agency agreement. So, here's, here's my form. Just pretend I've filled it out. For my PDF attachments, (from the More dropdown in the top toolbar) I want to go into files and choose my file. So here I have a lovely test file that I'm attaching when I upload that test file. And it has to be a PDF; I just want to make that point here. There's my test PDF. That's it. And when I scroll down my document, there's my test file. So, that's my PDF, you can see it on screen. Now I have to finalise it because signatures can't appear until I finalised a form. So, I'm going to go back to that test file, pretty PDF, and in the top left-hand corner there's an Edit Fields button, right so this is where I can pick and drop the signatures that are available in the form. So, in this form, it's set as client, Client (1), Client (2), and when I click on signature, I simply drag it to where I want that signature and it automatically puts it in. This is the signature. I can separate these (fields), if I've got this document set up that, you know, the name appears somewhere else. So, it will be required, and that’s ready to go.

Kylie: And the name and everything comes across too?

Anita: Correct, correct. So, if this had two clients, I would do the same thing, and if the agent wants to sign off on it as well — here's the whole loop closed. You can do exactly the same thing. So you can pick and choose where it goes and how it works, what appears in the form, and then it will flow from signature to signature, and thank you for asking for a demo. We do have resources on our website that has these little videos and in our Help Guides, because, you know, depends if you want to read or if you want to watch it in action. And maybe it's got a prettier test file than mine.

Kylie: I'm sure. And so just give us a quick view on the annexures, because we almost did that.

Anita: Annexures are when the form is in draft, so we're still completing the form, because that's when annexes are available for you to use. When you when you select your annexures, so, the sidebar, I can select annexures, and I can view the different types of annexure. In this tenancy agreement, I've got an annexure for rent increase that's or additional landlords and tenants. But here is where I can add blank annexures, or blank signable annexures. So, you could use a combination, so that that Mornington Peninsula agent I was talking about earlier, they had three pages worth of annex annexure wording, so we used blank, blank, then signable. That's why we've set them up this way — blank, blank, signable. If you simply wanted to use just the signable annexure when you update your form, you will see that it's got a blank annexure available with signatures.

Kylie: So, you can type in your copied and pasted content.

Anita: Exactly. And you can name the annexure ABC or annexure marketing or referencing what's in it. And I suggest if, as with my client we were talking about, we set that up in their template, because every time they wanted to create that tenancy agreement or rental agreement in Victoria, they wanted that information in there. These are our additional terms. I want my client to sign off on that. So again, it's that choose your own adventure. What works better, your beautiful PDF, not mine, or signable blank annexures. Signable annexures, it's a cool tool.

Kylie: So, there's two things here. If you're doing it this way, with a blank annexure, I guess you would have all the text sitting in a document somewhere else on your system, and you'll copy and paste and put that correct. But if you put the same one all the time, like if you've got standard annexure that always go goes into it, rather than asking your whole team to be copying and pasting, copy and paste and pasting, copying and pasting, copying and pasting every time, I'm assuming you would set that up as a standard annexure that you have set up right?

Anita: Absolutely. I would set it up in my template and encourage my team to create the form from the template, and that way it's consistent. And as an example, if, in that annexure, that signable annexure, you have, let's say details, your emergency contact details. You know, it's Jim's emergency service, right? But if you decide to change that provider within your agency and go, you know, I'm tired of Jim's, I'm using James's instead, you change it in the template, in that signable Blank annexure, in that signable annexure, change those details. So, from that moment on, anytime someone creates a form from that template, they're getting the latest information. Because we know how fast real estate moves and how we have to tweak the details that appear in your forms. So my suggestion efficiency from that efficiency profile is, set it up in your template, set it up in your template, and then everyone in your team is using the same thing all the time.

Kylie: Anita, we've had a quick question — My Forms live doesn't look like the one that you're showing us. Mine is blue and it doesn't have mappings, prefill, or history.

Anita: That's my sneaky. That's my testing profile, so you won't have those three. That's me, that's my special profile, because I work here.

Kylie: The part that you need to go to is the More button, is it not?

Anita: Absolutely, absolutely.

Kylie: You do have that, Dale, so that's the most important thing.

Anita: Correct, and apologies, Dale for leading you astray.

Kylie: Okay, so, so we've talked about some examples on how they would all work. It's not hard to find those features. We've checked all that out. So sending a document out to sign is all well and good, but, one of the most important things about signatures is that you need to know, or has it been signed? Or is there an issue with it being signed? Because that often then impacts things down the track, and the next step that you need to take, doesn't it?

Anita: Correct.

Kylie: How do we find see that in Forms Live?

Anita: You can get notifications, right? Email notifications. Now, I used to, I used to teach people how to use Outlook. And there's two schools of thought with emails, right? There are some people, and I'm a zero unread emails type person. I make sure I read everything. We know about email fatigue as well, right? Some people are inundated. My 10,000 unread emails, friend, I get tired just looking at the icon, right? You can choose. Choose again, choose your own adventure. Do you want your agency to have notification emails and at what stage? And you can also see things within the platform. What I'll start with, I'm going to look at my agency details, which is in the bottom left-hand corner and under agency. So, I'm a principal user of Forms Live, so I've got the ability to set this for everyone who's in this profile, and you'll see here the notification. So some people, some agencies, I just want to know when it's signed, right? I just want to know. I want to get an email. I want to get a specific email when a form is signed. So that's what I've got checked here, right? Zero unread emails. I'm a bit of a control freak as well. I like to know, has someone viewed it? I just read them and file them away, right? You can have that choice as well. Do you want to see when someone has viewed the form? Which could be important in a sales area, a property manager who is email fatigued may not.

Kylie: Tenancy agreements or tenancy applications you might not want to see when every single tenant that applied for the property viewed their document, that might wear you out.

Anita: Correct. So here is where you can set it. You know, how do we want to play? Do I just want to get an email? And this doesn't mean we're leaving you in the lurch in forms live and I'll show you those, those icons that are available, but this gives you that choice of setting up that email profile, viewing, signing, viewing and signing, or just the signing complete. I just want to know when it's done, right? I just want to know when it's done.

Kylie: But basically what you're saying here is I just want to know when it when it's done by email. The email that I want you to tell me when it's done is just but it doesn't matter. I never know anything about it if I don't want to go looking.

Anita: spot on, spot on. And this is also in this same area where I can set up reminders. Okay, so for a signing document, for a document that I have sent out for signing, I can set up reminders that it'll ping that person one day, three days and seven days afterwards, right until they sign it, which is good leave that to if you want that again, that's a choice. I can also set a final reminder for the agent, right? So a document hasn't been signed for seven days. That's probably something that's important to me to follow up. What we're doing here is improving efficiency in sending forms and creating forms and leaving that communication piece pinging you for the communication piece, which is all you, right? It's, it's what your job is. It's the essential part. We don't want to take those essential parts away from you. We want to make sure that you're on top of it so you can set those changes.

Kylie: Is that universal? So, like, if I set that up for my agency, does it work for all of the forms in my system?

Anita: Correct.

Kylie: So while I might want to see if I'm sending out a document that I want them to sign that says that they've agreed to take me on as an agent and I might want to see that they've opened it and looked at it, but I might not want all the tenancy ones to do, but that's a blanket that applies.

Anita: It is a blanket at the moment.

Kylie: Give Anita your feedback, and she'll put it on the roadmap.

Anita: Absolutely, absolutely, and that's the point. We've improved Forms Live because of subscribers. I'm happy to hear feedback. You know, we are happy to hear feedback. It's where you learn the most. As for in the platform notifications, I can there's a few things I can do, so I've got icons available to me here. I can hover and I can see that green tick, that client signed it. The orange pencil says, Hey, someone hasn't signed this yet. I've also got filters that I can choose from. Okay, so what is signed? Oh, no, signed forms. There you go. What's signing? There you go. I've got a form out for signing. And even beyond that, when it comes to the agent myself, I have to sign certain forms. We have it set up that clients will sign first, the agent will sign last in most forms if I've switched off notifications in my area that I was showing before. I just want to be able to pop in. What do I need to sign? What do I need to sign? There's a button right at the top here, action required. So this little action required, and it's got a little indicator saying one action required, one for me when I click that's telling me sign now that is the agent signature that is outstanding. So I could sit there on an afternoon I try and block my time. There's my Outlook training coming out, block my time, categorise my time. So I could sit there in front of forms live and go. Great. Now it's time for me to get all my signing done. Action required when I click sign now it takes me straight into that form and takes me to my signature, as simple as that, with without having multiple tabs open, without having to log in somewhere else, which, again, that efficiency side of me aches for all the time just leave. I just want to be in one place and do my stuff right.

Kylie: It's the modern dilemma like that. You know, it's hardly a workday that goes by without 15 tabs open. If we can pull it back to 10, that would be fantastic.

Anita: Correct, correct? There you go. I've finished signing that. I've done right? I've gone through it and that's the point, your clients will see the ability to download that signed document. Once everyone's signed, notifications will come out, and instant my action required, yay, check. I've done that.

Kylie: I know we've got one more quick use case for signatures. How could you these, you know, the notifications and the annexes and the PDFs and all of that stuff, and the built in signing to do something like streamlining either utility connections or something like that.

Anita: Utility connections are a great one for our property manager. Property managers that are on the call, they know what utility connections are about. There's a revenue source that's available to you.

Kylie: It shouldn’t be just for property managers, offer it to people that are buying. If I've just spent, you know, half a million or a million bucks on buying a property, I don't want to deal with utility connections either.

Anita: Correct, and that's our next area. We're moving into that contract deferred signing the winning buyer will get that connection when they sign. The problem is the buyer signs at first before the vendor, but then it's coming back. There's a little workflow that we are workshopping to how we can do that for tenants. But for your tenancies and most agencies have some sort of relationship with one of the utility providers that we provide.

Kylie: You guys have a huge number of integrations setup.

Anita: So, we suggest making that connection. Whichever one is your favorite, you connect that in Forms Live, and it'll prompt you for your username as provided by your utility provider. Once you've got, that connected, at the end of the tenancy agreement signing — you saw how quick it was for me to sign. You've got the tenancy agreement, or the rental agreement, once they've finished signing and they've seen your, this is the procedures for my agency, who you've got to contact regarding what, they sign that — great, they're all excited because they're going to be moving into the property. Then we instantly ask permission from them, are you interested in this utility provider, that one that you're connected to? They'll say, Yes, I want to know more. Great. Hop on. They'll complete the details, and that referral will go straight to your chosen utility provider, and they go from there. Once you've got it set up, it means it's done. I don't have to think about it and it's the right person at the right time, because you're asking them to sign a tenancy agreement. They're the ones who are going to be moving in. They're the ones who need that utility connection. So, set it once and forget it. I suggest anyone that's got a relationship with a utility provider do that. Utility connection provider set it up and forget about it.

Kylie: Seriously. That feels like it's about a 15 minute piece of work to just get it set up once, and then just watch the magic happen.

Anita: Don't have to think about it, which I like to do about a lot of stuff. Let's have not a bit of not thinking about that, because I've done the hard work already. What have you said before? Go slow to move fast, right?

Kylie: Well, sometimes you do, don't you? Just take that extra 10-15 minutes at the when you when you're setting these things up, so that you can save (so much time). And it might only take one or two minutes to do it each time, but it doesn't really, because you've got to remember to do it, and then you've got to do it, you know, you've got to send it, and you've got to look up the details to send it, and you've got to attach it to the document and all that sort of stuff. No, no. We have enough going on in our lives, we have enough mental labor going on in our lives, or administrative labor going on, like anything you can do to set these things up, makes complete sense to me. Okay, so look, I'm conscious of the time. Just quickly to wrap up. How much does using the inbuilt signing with forms live cost?

Anita: It's just the subscription for forms live. It is in there. There's no extra. It is available for you, absolutely. If you've got Forms Live, if you've got a forms like subscription, it’s there for you.

Kylie: What if you've already gone down the path of subscribing to one of the other providers out there, can you bring them together? Can you get through that subscription and use it up before you move over? Or are there different things that you can add it in?

Anita: It's an interesting question, Kylie. I am aware that people do have external products for signing absolutely evaluate it. Use it up, see how long is left, switch over. If you've got DocuSign, there is an ability to connect to Forms Live. Use it up and then choose not re-subscribe to the external product. You know, it just made sense to us for it to be there and for there to be no friction point for people using.

Anita: Dale, sorry, I just saw on the messages, you should have. You do have eSigning in Forms Live. If you can shoot me your email address, I'll pop it through to our support team, and we can get them to help you out. Remember, you’ve got to finalise the form before you can use signing.

Kylie: So draft, finalise, then add signatures.

Anita: Then signing is just there. It makes sense.

Kylie: Okay. Awesome, awesome. And yes, Carol, you could probably ditch Adobe.

Anita: You know, there are uses for everything.

Kylie: But if it's sitting in the background with, you know, a single life emergencies and things...

Anita: Correct. And I think the big thing is it's everyone in the agency. It's everyone who's in the profile, so there's no barriers when you're away from the office or someone has reset their password for their external it's in a different tab — it's making me go cross site. You don't have to worry about that, because you log in, you've got it there available for you. And thank you, Dale, I've got your email. We'll be in contact with you.

Kylie: Awesome. Well, look, Anita, that has been so informative. I’ve had a love hate relationship with electronic signing myself, had some great user cases of how not to do it as a real estate agent conveyancer, had some personal experiences with that. So it has been so helpful and informative to hear, and I love the fact that it's not an add on at the end — it’s actually integrated into the real workflow. And the efficiency of how we perform as property managers and real estate agents, and you guys have thought that through so carefully. So thank you so much for your time today. I hope everyone's learnt something useful. Thank you so much. If you've got any other further questions, please reach out to Anita and the Forms Live team. As she said, they love feedback. We're going to work on her about ‘Does everybody, every single form have to have the same notifications on it?’ I'm sure that's going to be on the roadmap now. But thanks everybody for sharing your lunchtime with us and we'll see you next time.

Anita: Thank you everyone