RelaNet Sign: A DocuSign Alternative

If you have researched electronic signatures at all, you’ve probably heard of DocuSign. They are one of the biggest providers of e-signatures, and they have a great product. DocuSign is also a huge business. They have hundreds of thousands of customers, and expect to book over one billion dollars in revenue this year. They are a big enterprise company, focused on big enterprise customers. Maybe because of this, their pricing plans aren’t very attractive to many small tax and accounting firms that are concerned about their budget.

You see, the prices listed on DocuSign’s website aren’t for any plan that you would want to use as a tax preparer. The “consumer plans” that DocuSign lists on their website don’t include knowledge-based authentication (or “KBA”), which is required for IRS e-file Signature Authorization forms (IRS Form 8878 and 8879). And getting signatures on these forms is the main reason that most tax preparers are interested in electronic signatures in the first place.

DocuSign Commercial Accounts

With DocuSign, if you want to use knowledge-based authentication—which you almost certainly do as a tax preparer—you have to sign up for one of their “commercial accounts.” Pricing for commercial accounts works differently than it does for the consumer accounts DocuSign advertises on its website. For commercial accounts, you pay per “signature envelope”. (In DocuSign’s parlance, “signature envelope” is just another way of saying “requested signature”.)

That may not sound so bad until you realize that you have to buy signature envelopes in batches of 500, and there’s a mandatory 15% “support fee” that you have to pay for each signature envelope you purchase. But that’s just for a standard signature. If you want to use KBA (as you would on Form 8879), then you have to pay an additional fee on top of that. The end result is that using a DocuSign commercial accounts to request electronic signatures from your tax clients is almost certainly going to be more expensive than the prices DocuSign lists on its website.

DocuSign Pricing Example

Let’s take a look at what a small tax preparer might pay DocuSign during a tax year to request electronic signatures on Form 8879 from 500 clients:

And for that price, all you get are electronic signatures.

RelaNet vs. DocuSign

Now compare the pricing for DocuSign’s commercial accounts to what you might pay for RelaNet Sign during a year. With RelaNet Sign, you don’t pay for individual “signing envelopes” or signing requests. Instead, as many signatures as you would like are included in your monthly RelaNet subscription. There’s also no support fee. Any support you might need is included in your monthly subscription, and it’s just a phone call away. RelaNet does charge a $3.00 fee for each signature request that is sent with knowledge-based authentication, but even with that, RelaNet Sign ends up looking like a bargain compared to a DocuSign commercial account.

RelaNet Pricing Example

Let’s take the same small tax preparer used in the example above, and see what he might pay to RelaNet for electronic signatures during a year. We’ll assume he has the same 500 clients, and that he requests e-signatures on Form 8879 from all those clients.

In this example you save $1,322 per year with RelaNet, compared to a DocuSign commercial account. That’s a 33% savings!

Other Included RelaNet Services

The examples above show that RelaNet Sign is a great bargain, but that’s only half the story. With RelaNet you get a lot more than just e-signatures. An entire suite of online tools come with your RelaNet subscription. When you subscribe to RelaNet’s Pro Plan to get access electronic signatures, you also get these services:

• Client Portal
• Video Conferencing
• Customized Website
• Client Newsletter Service
• Monthly Website Content
• Branded Email Accounts
• Productivity Tools
• Online Credit Card Payments
• Online Appointment Scheduling
• …and more!

You would pay thousands of dollars per year for these services if you purchased them a la carte from other providers.

And all of these services come with RelaNet’s all-inclusive service. If you ever have a question or a problem with your RelaNet service, we’re just an email or a phone call away.

RelaNet Can Help

If you would like more information about RelaNet Sign, or any of our other RelaNet services, please get in touch using the information below. We would be happy to answer your questions, and be of any other help we can.