Signature Capture for Small Businesses

PDA technology has come of age and the associated benefits that were once the preserve of large corporate business are finally filtering down to the small business sector. One of the areas that a lot of small businesses are looking to transform is how they schedule their mobile workforce whether they are engineers or couriers and secondly capture their customer's signatures as proof of work complete or the delivery of goods or services. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to utilise Microsoft Outlook to schedule the field workers, if they are kitted out with PDAs running Windows software their appointments can be coordinated centrally and the cost of the PDA is equivalent to a mobile phone contract. The advantages of this are the field workers don't have to visit the office to pick their work schedule for the day as they will have it on their PDA which means you could potentially schedule more appointments in per day, reduce the cost of travelling due to uneccessary trips to the office and redcued carbon-footprint. The next win is to utilise a piece of software like iSignature which allows you to capture job details as well as the customer's signature, this can then be turned into a pdf and e-mailed straight back to HQ and the customer as soon as the job is complete. This has a big effect on a small business for a couple of reasons firstly you have auditable evidence of when the work was completed and who signed for it which will help to reduce bad debt and secondly you can invoice your customers more quickly which helps with cash-flow which is so imporatnt from a business perspective. These small changes for a minimal outlay can have a dramatic effect to help streamline a small businesses working practice and help improve cash-flow and commuincation.