For Cottons, signing was never the issue on its own. Documents were being sent digitally. Clients could sign. The friction appeared in the gaps between systems.
Different tools handled different stages. Signing status was not always visible in one place. Signed documents sometimes needed to be manually exported. During busy periods, that created risk and unnecessary delay.
As the firm progressed with its cloud migration and moved practice management to FYI, the signing process needed to fit into a single, connected workflow.
About Cottons
Cottons works primarily with SMEs and provides accounts, payroll, bookkeeping, tax services, audit, tax advisory and corporate finance support.
Emma Reid, Partner at Cottons, explained that the firm has around 120 staff across six offices. The team regularly sends accounts, corporation tax returns, personal tax returns, letters of engagement and share transfer documents for signing.
With that level of activity, consistency and visibility are not optional. They are operational requirements.
What Signing Looked like Before
Before adopting FuseSign, the firm used two different systems: the CCH online portal and Xero Tax document packs powered by Adobe Sign.
Neither solution provided a seamless experience.
The CCH portal allowed documents to be uploaded for signing, but it was not a modern e-signing process. When the firm moved to Xero Tax, they began using its document packs, which offered e-signing functionality, but this operated separately from their wider document management setup.
The result was a process that felt disconnected.
Clients experienced difficulty using both systems. Some were unable to complete the process digitally, which led to delays. In certain cases, documents had to be posted or signed in person.
Internally, staff had limited visibility of signing status. With Xero, team members had to log in separately to check whether documents had been signed. Access was restricted and there was no central dashboard. Data could not easily be exported or reported on.
Signed documents in Xero remained within that system. Someone needed to export them manually and save them into the document management system. During busy periods, this step was sometimes missed, meaning the final signed version was not always stored where it needed to be.
Visibility and control were inconsistent.
