Snapcart™ Introduces Leading-Edge Electronic Signature Feature
Posted on 30 August 2024 in General
The new Snapcart™ Electronic Signature feature allows logistics organisations to acquire customer signatures in a way that is easy for all drivers, safe and inexpensive.
Documents can be signed on any Android® device with or without a stylus. Signed documents are encrypted which means it is tamperproof and further editing is prevented. Using Snapcart for your business’ process of delivering goods, will save your organisation valuable time that would normally be lost due to missing paperwork, illegible handwriting and manual capturing of hard copy data.
With Snapcart’s Electronic Signature Feature, a logistics business will immediately start saving money as there is no costly printing of waybill books or proof of delivery slips.
As an added benefit, you will also be preventing fraud as GPS coordinates are captured at the point of signing, thus putting the driver with the signatory at the exact time as captured by the Snapcart Mobile Application.
Become more efficient. Save money. Prevent fraud.
The South African Electronic Communications and Transactions Act sets out three requirements that an electronic signature needs to satisfy: 1) The signature needs to be able to identify the signatory 2) The signatory needs to indicate their approval 3) The method of capturing the signature needs to be appropriately reliable under the circumstances under which the document is signed.
The South African National Credit Act furthermore stipulates that an electronic signature must be protected by unauthorised usage and is attached, incorporated or logically associated with the data. Acts relating to financial law is often used as the benchmark to measure the level of security and compliance of a technology because of its, normally more, stringent interpretations.
Snapcart uses the impression™ signature plugin for Android which meets and surpasses all of the legal requirements for signatures. Using the security features embedded in the PDF standard, impression™ is able to lock down and secure both the document and signature data.
Why Use A Paperless Process?
Waybills or proof of delivery documents are typically printed in triplicate or quadruplicate books in bulk. In South Africa, this amounts to between R1.20 and R1.60 per document. That’s a cost for each delivery. Some processes require more documents e.g. diesel dockets and driver manifests.
This amounts to a considerable expense per delivery. These documents must find their way into the digital world. This needs manual scanning of the documents, manual capturing of the information on them and then eventually storing these documents. The storage of documents alone is a cost that can be in the hundreds-of-thousands of rands annually for even a medium sized company.
Eventually, these documents must also be destroyed once it has outlived its mandatory archiving period. However, storing a typical waybill digitally, only costs a fraction of a cent annually. The risk of losing a digital document is also minute compared to that of a hard copy.
The Cost of Losing Paper
Most documents involved in delivering goods by a transport company or courier are required to be stored for a period of ten years under South African law. Having these physical documents lie on someone’s desk or in a cardboard box somewhere in the building poses a big legal and financial risk.
Often, these critical documents changes possession numerous times from operator, to the driver, to the customer, back to the driver, back to the operator, to invoicing clerk to the scanning clerk as a simple example.
This provides gaping opportunities for the document to be lost, stolen, tampered with, damaged beyond legibility or simply just being illegible. For cargo carriers, this is a massive risk as invoicing typically only happens after a signed P.O.D. is received by the invoicing clerk.
A delay in invoicing causes a delay in payment which can have far reaching implications for the organisation’s cash flow. The cost of making digital backup copies is negligible compared to making hard copy backups of a document.
The Cost of Inefficiency
Duplication of work is an obvious cause of high costs. The same information is often written down or captured more than once. Manually writing information down also increases the risk of incorrect or misspelt information. Often a person’s handwriting style proves challenging.
This waste’s time and money as the information has to be verified. A physical waybill or proof of a delivery document, can also only be in one place at any one time. This means that staff who need to act on the information needs to wait for the document to be given to him or her. By having the document digitally, different functions relying on that document can be performed simultaneously.
Access Your Proof of Deliveries, Anywhere, Anytime
Unlike paper documents, your electronic documents can be accessed at any time, no matter where you are in the world. A transport company’s personnel are not bound to the same geographical location to collaborate. Snapcart provides a convenient document gallery for anyone in the organisation with the appropriate permission to download or view a document.
Customer Branding
By default, a Snapcart generated proof of delivery in a common format is used when a signature is required. Alternatively, customers can submit an example of their document to Snapcart. Snapcart’s designers will ensure that the document that is generated, is identical to the submitted one.
The company’s logo, contact details and other info can be displayed on the electronic edition of your document as it appears on the hard copy.
Security Tamper-Poof Signed Documents
Once your document is signed, the security features built into the application ensures that the document is immune to tampering and further editing. The document, including all of its data and the signature, is encrypted using an industry standard strength security certificate.
The document is then sent via a secured connection to the Snapcart cloud servers where it is safely stored. All of Snapcart’s data and the documents of its customers are stored in secure data centres at different locations. The data centres are designed for maximum security and resilience against natural disasters and theft.
Snapcart Captures GPS Information
Snapcart makes use of the smartphone’s location service to retrieve the GPS location of where the signing is taking place. This information is added to the resulting PDF and encrypted with the rest of the data in the document, thus preventing tampering or further editing. Managers can use this information to assist in fraud investigations.
Andre Trollip, Snapcart Director
Snapcart is changing the logistics and transport industry in South Africa. Snapcart allows anyone to get the best price and service for transporting any goods with safe, secure online payments. Download our free app: iTunes /GooglePlay.