Our own document archive with in-browser signing

Contracts, annexes, offers and scopes of work are created all the time, and they ended up scattered across email threads, folders and external signing services billed per user every month. Finding a specific contract started with searching the inbox.

Every signature also meant the same manual loop: download, open in another tool, sign, save, send back.

Docs Hub covers the whole life of a document. It is uploaded once and from then on has its own place, data and history, in an archive filtered by type, status, the other party, tags and period.

Documents are signed in the browser, from a personal signature library or with a pen, and the original never changes: every edit creates a new version. When the other party needs to sign, they get an email link and sign without an account, and both sides receive the signed document automatically.

The hard part was the PDF. Signing must not break qualified electronic signatures, and shared hosting has no PDF tooling, so PDFs are rendered and signed in the browser, with signatures written as vector graphics and the text left searchable. The recipient never sends a PDF back, only their signature, and the final document is assembled on our side, so its content cannot be changed on the way.

We dropped the monthly subscription to an external signing service. Every business document is in one place and found by search instead of digging through email, and signing a contract takes seconds instead of minutes and several programs.