What is Signoff Tool?

Software used to record an approval on a document, which may or may not be a signature in the legal sense.

A signoff tool records that somebody with authority approved something: a design, a timesheet, a purchase order, a handbook acknowledgement. Some produce a legal signature with an audit trail; others record a click in a database and produce nothing the approver could later be shown. The difference only surfaces when an approval is disputed, which is exactly when it matters, so it is worth knowing which kind you have before you need to rely on it.

Drop your document here and sign it now. PDF, Word and Excel all work: a .docx or .xlsx is laid out in your browser exactly as it was written, so there is nothing to convert first. Add a signature, a date, a company stamp or a watermark, then download it sealed. Free to start, no account, and the file is never uploaded to open it.

Approval versus signature

An approval inside a workflow tool is evidence that a button was pressed in that tool. A signature produces a document, held by both parties, that stands on its own. For internal steps the first is usually enough. For anything a third party, an auditor or a court may need to see, the second is what the question will be about.

What to look for in a signoff tool

Whether the approver receives a copy of what they approved, whether the record fixes the version of the document rather than pointing at a link that can change, and whether anyone outside the system can verify it. A signoff that points at a wiki page which has since been edited proves very little.