When a process is too slow, the instinct is to look for the slowest-looking step and fix that. In government, that step is usually signature. Something needs sign-off, sign-off means paperwork, paperwork means printing, scanning, or chasing someone down the hall — so the fix seems obvious: get an e-signature tool.
And to be fair, e-signature does fix that part. But for a lot of agencies, signature was never really the problem. Approval was. Those are not the same thing, and mixing them up is how teams end up with a signature tool doing a workflow’s job – and usually not doing it very well.
Signature and approval aren’t interchangeable
A signature is a legal requirement. It exists because a contract, a regulation, or a statute says a specific person has to attest to something in a way that is legally binding — and provable if it ever gets challenged. That’s a high bar, and it’s the right bar for the things that actually need it.
An approval is different. It’s a decision that needs to be documented and auditable — who reviewed it, who said yes, and when. An approval isn’t informal or optional, but “auditable decision-making” and “legally binding signature” aren’t the same thing. Most internal approvals need a clear, traceable record of the decision. They don’t need a signature that would hold up in court for a simple internal approval.
The confusion is understandable. Government runs on documentation. Something needs to be on record, it needs to be clear who authorized it, and it needs to be findable later if anyone asks. E-signature delivers all of that — but so does a workflow platform that routes, timestamps, and logs every decision automatically. The difference is that one treats every step like a static contract, and the other treats it like what it actually is: a step in the greater process.
The trouble starts when signature becomes the default way to get a yes. It’s fast to set up, it’s familiar, and it produces something that looks official. So instead of asking “does this step legally require a signature,” teams ask “how do I get someone to sign off on this” — and the answer is always the same tool, whether or not it’s the right one.
The Signature Test
Before sending something out for signature, three questions:
- Is this legally required to be signed?Contracts, certain HR actions, anything with a statutory or audit requirement — yes. Alow budget number getting a thumbs-up before procurement runs with it — usually no.
- Am I capturing a decision, or moving something forward?If what you actually need is “did the director say this is fine,” that’s an approval.It needs a decision and a record of who made it. It doesn’t need an envelope.
- What happens if I skip the signature and just route it for a yes or no?If nothing legally breaks,you’ve found a step that belongs in a workflow — not in an envelope.
If a step fails any of these, it’s a real signature. If it passes all three, it’s a the approval stage of a workflow.
Why it matters: cost and accuracy
E-signature isn’t free. Most platforms charge per envelope — sometimes per recipient. When signature is your default approval mechanism, every internal yes costs money. Multiply that across dozens of processes running simultaneously, and the bill adds up fast for something that was never meant to replace a workflow.
But cost is only part of it. The deeper problem is accuracy.
A signature means something. Legally, the person signing is attesting that what they’re signing is correct. That creates pressure to get the document right before it goes out — which sounds fine in theory, but in practice, most internal approval processes involve details that are still in motion. Reviewers catch things. Numbers get adjusted. Language updates. When those updates happen after a signature event, you have a problem: the document the next person receives doesn’t match what the previous person signed off on.
So it goes back out. Another envelope. Another wait. Another charge.
This is the part that rarely shows up in the original decision to buy an e-signature tool: you’re not just paying for the signatures you planned on. You’re paying for every correction, every re-send, every time the process moved forward before it was ready. A workflow platform handles those iterations internally — approvals adjust, comments get resolved, documents get updated — before anything goes out for signature. By the time the envelope is sent, the document is actually final. One send. One signature. Done.
Take any multi-step approval process — a request that has to pass through several reviewers before it’s final. In a lot of agencies, each handoff looks the same: the document goes out for signature, comes back, gets updated, goes out again. If something changes at step two, step one has to re-sign. If something changes at step three, steps one and two have to re-sign.
By the time the request reaches final approval, the same document may have generated a half-dozen signature events — each one its own envelope, its own wait, and in many e-signature tools, its own line on the bill.
But look closely at most of those steps. The intermediate reviewers aren’t authorizing anything in a legal sense. They’re saying “this looks right to me, pass it along.” That’s an approval. It belongs in a workflow, with a timestamp and a name attached, not in an envelope. The only step that genuinely needs a binding signature is the last one — the final authorization that closes the process.
Run that same process through a workflow platform and the math changes completely. Reviewers approve at each stage inside the system — trackable, auditable, on record. One envelope goes out at the end, once, when the document is actually final. One signature. One charge. And no re-sends because something changed in the middle.
E-signature still matters — as a step, not a system
In government, e-signature isn’t going away. Contracts get executed. Agreements get authorized. Some decisions carry real legal weight and need a binding, provable attestation to back them up.
The point is narrower: e-signature should be one step inside a process, triggered when a document actually clears the legal bar for it — not the tool you reach for every time something needs a yes. When it’s the whole system, every approval becomes a document, every document becomes an envelope, and every envelope is something somebody has to pay for, track, and eventually re-send when the details change.
The agencies that get the most out of e-signature are the ones who treat it as the final step in a clean process — not a substitute for having one. When the workflow handles the approvals, the iterations, and the back-and-forth, the document that goes out for signature is actually ready. No corrections. No re-sends. No paying for the same envelope three times.
Fix the workflow, and the question of what needs a signature gets a lot easier to answer — because there’s a lot less left that does.
Ready to sort out your workflow from your signature process? Talk to our team about how SimpliGov handles both — so the right steps get the right tool, and nothing goes out for signature before it’s ready.
