Accounting-tech platform Digilence uses Verdocs eSignature to deliver a seamless signing experience to the accounting industry.
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About Digilence
Digilence, headquartered in Atlanta, is a leading provider of automation software to the accounting industry. It provides digital intelligence to Power the Digital Firm® with a suite of AI-infused digital solutions. Tailored specifically for the accounting industry, the Digilence Cloud delivers a suite of off-the-shelf subscription products to digitize inefficient processes, modernize firm delivery, and transform the client experience across tax, audit, and the client engagement lifecycle for top 400 accounting firms, all on a single subscription-based platform. Co-founded by Inc. 500 entrepreneur Chad Osgood, Digilence delivers best-in-class tools to its customers through its Digilence Partner Program.
The Challenge: Playing middleman with manual experiences
The Accounting profession has a problem: its members frequently spend nearly 50% of their working effort playing middleman to their tech stack.
stack (noun) – an orderly pile or heap
tech stack (compound noun) – a metaphor for visualizing software systems used together to get work done
Chad Osgoode puts it this way:
“The accounting practice solutions are all broken…most firms have anywhere between 15-30 different systems all overlapping each other. Accounting firms spend upwards of 50% of their time doing what we call busy work, and it causes the cost of servicing a client to skyrocket”
Chad would know. As CEO, he has built Digilence into a leader in accounting digitization by tackling that very problem.
“We see firms spending over 50% of the time doing repetitive, manual processes:. Dragging files between folders, inputting identical data into 3, 4, or even 5 systems…”
To be clear…this is not a new insight. Technology companies have been trying to address this problem for 30+ years. Their solution was to build software that DOES more things, resulting in behemoth systems that do many things but rarely do any of them well.
Digilence took a counterintuitive approach to tackle the problem: the best route to providing accounting firms with a seamless, end-to-end practice solution was for Digilence to hyper-focus.
What did Chad and the team at Digilence hyperfocus on? Building a superior integration platform. Chad knew that the problem was not that the best tools for every step in the accounting workflow did not exist…the problem was that these tools already existed, but they did not integrate.
Digilence could solve the problem by not making their customers change their software but by taking their existing solutions and building better integrations.
The Solution: End-to-End Emeddable eSignature Solution
The key to Digilence creating a seamless end-to-end workflow IS NOT building a behemoth, bloated system that does everything. Rather it is finding the most agile and robust tools for each step in the accounting workflow and combining them into a top-tier platform. That’s why he created the Digilence Partner Program.
“The Digilence Partner Program standards ensure that we are only partnering with the best software solutions that will allow us to continually deliver the most intuitive user experience for our clients and their customers.”
When finding the best partner for a seamless digital signature solution, Chad initially found only expensive, inflexible legacy solutions dominating the market.
“With DocuSign and Adobe Sign, the technical nuances and giant walls of bureaucratic red tape allowed only limited flexibility with digital signature processes. They’re just not 3rd-party integrator friendly.”
“Many eSign companies claim to have easily-accessed and open APIs…but the reality is different.” Adobe Sign was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Chad’s team spent weeks trying to get basic answers to Adobe Sign’s supposed “developer-friendly” API, only to be met with radio silence. They finally resorted to reaching out to friendly contacts who helped identify a key contact, only to immediately receive an email response that Adobe Sign would help them if they committed to spending $500,000+ on custom development services.
A hallmark of great companies is that they do not settle for “good enough.” Chad knows the key to keeping Digilence a step ahead of his competition is to always be hyper-focused on creating a more seamless customer experience. It wasn’t until he discovered the Verdocs digital signature platform.
“The most exciting aspect of Verdocs is it allows us to take the process of digital signatures and completely tailor it to our client’s specific needs, rather than forcing our clients to conform to an outdated and clunky eSign process”
Using Verdocs’ embeddable digital signature platform, Chad and his team at Digilence can provide their customers with a seamless, bespoke digital signature experience that is simply out of reach for all but the largest companies.
“Verdocs’s capacity to deliver a robust, easily-customizable digital signature solution is a huge factor for us that is sorely missing from the eSignature market.”
