Electronic signature for accounting, built for tax season.

In most cases, yes. Engagement letters, representation letters, audit confirmations, and the vast majority of accounting paperwork signed electronically carry the same legal weight as wet ink under the U.S. ESIGN Act of 2000 and state UETA laws, and under the EU's eIDAS regulation, provided four things are present: the signer intended to sign, consented to sign electronically, the signature is attributed to them, and a record is retained. Document eSign captures all four on every envelope and seals the finished PDF. The exception is documents with their own statutory rules - notably IRS e-file signature authorizations such as Form 8879, which the IRS governs separately. For client agreements, acknowledgments, and approvals, an e-signature with a full audit trail is binding and enforceable.

Yes. Build the engagement letter once as a reusable template with merge fields for the client's name, the service scope, and the fee, then send it for signature - the client completes it in the browser with no account and nothing to install. Each completed letter comes back sealed with a certificate of completion and the full audit trail: who signed, when, from which IP, and how they were verified. The template is reusable, so the next client's engagement letter goes out in seconds, and you can duplicate it for a different service line. During tax season you can bulk-send the same engagement template to your whole client list from a CSV, up to 5,000 envelopes per batch, and track every one to completion from a single screen.

Use caution here. Electronic signatures are widely used for engagement letters and return approvals, but remote signing of IRS Form 8879, the e-file signature authorization, has its own IRS requirements on permitted e-signature methods and identity verification - including, in the IRS guidance, knowledge-based authentication (KBA) for remote signers. Document eSign verifies signers with an emailed one-time passcode (OTP) or a per-signer PIN, not KBA, so it does not currently meet the IRS identity-verification standard for remote 8879 signing. Confirm the current IRS rules in Publication 1345 before relying on any e-signature method for Form 8879. For engagement letters, approvals, and acknowledgments that fall outside those IRS rules, Document eSign is a good fit.

Yes. Bulk send takes your engagement letter template and a CSV of your clients and creates a separate, personalized envelope for each one - up to 5,000 per batch - which is built for tax-season volume. Each client gets their own envelope, their own signing link, and their own certificate of completion, so nothing is shared or co-mingled. You watch live progress as letters go out and come back signed, and any rows that fail - a bad email address, a missing field - are exported so you can fix and resend just those. It turns a week of one-by-one sends at the start of the season into a single tracked job, and the same approach works for K-1 distributions and 1099 acknowledgments.

Yes. Scheduled send lets you queue a single envelope or a whole bulk batch to go out at a future date and time, which is useful for quarterly estimates and filings that have to land on the cut-off. You prepare the document now - say a quarterly engagement reminder or a payroll authorization - set the send date, and it transmits automatically without you having to remember on the day. Combined with bulk send, you can line up an entire quarter's recurring client documents in advance and let them go out on schedule. Everything that completes carries the same certificate of completion and audit trail as a document you send by hand.

Yes. Every signature is captured on an append-only audit trail and rendered into a certificate of completion: the signer's email and IP address, a timestamp for every action - sent, opened, consented, verified, and signed - and the verification method used. The finished PDF is sealed with a SHA-256 hash and an embedded PAdES-B signature, so any change to a single character after signing breaks the seal and is flagged as altered in any standards-compliant reader. That package is exactly the kind of defensible trail an auditor or reviewer wants behind an audit confirmation or representation letter, and it travels with the document. It is materially stronger than a scanned wet-ink copy, which carries none of that metadata.

Yes. Require an emailed one-time passcode (OTP) so the client must enter a code sent to their email before the document opens, or set a per-signer access PIN that you share separately out-of-band, so only the intended client can sign. For either method, the verification type, the time it happened, the client's IP address, and their device are all recorded on the certificate of completion next to the signature. This is useful on higher-value engagements where attribution is worth documenting. SMS one-time-passcode verification is coming soon as an additional phone-based factor. Note that OTP and PIN are not the same as the knowledge-based authentication the IRS requires for remote Form 8879 signing.

Yes. Signing runs entirely in the mobile browser, so a client can review and sign an engagement letter, an approval, or an acknowledgment from a phone or tablet with nothing to install and no account to create. The client taps the secure link in their email, reviews the document, agrees to your consent wording, and signs by typing or drawing - producing the same legally binding signature and the same audit trail they would get on a laptop. During a busy season that matters: a client travelling or between meetings can complete their part in a couple of minutes, and you see it land in your workspace, sealed, the moment they finish, so the file keeps moving.

Nothing is auto-deleted or expired - a signed engagement letter, approval, or confirmation stays in your Document eSign workspace until you choose to remove it, so a file from two seasons ago is still there with its certificate intact. You can export any completed PDF and its audit trail at any time, so you keep your own copies in whatever document-management system your firm already uses. On Business and above, every signed PDF and its certificate are also mirrored automatically to your Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive in a folder structure you control, and completed documents carry an independent TSA timestamp that anchors the signing time to a trusted third party - useful for records that may be examined years later.

Yes. The Free plan includes unlimited envelopes and two reusable templates with a full audit trail on every document, which is enough for a solo practitioner to send engagement letters and approvals without paying or entering a card. As a firm grows, paid plans add team members, custom consent and disclaimer wording, bulk send and scheduled send for tax-season volume, in-person signing, a bring-your-own email domain, branding, and automatic cloud backup - but the core signing, the PAdES seal, and the legal validity are identical on every plan, including Free. You are not buying enforceability on the higher tiers; you are buying scale, branding, and administrative control.