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HOW TO: Sign, Seal, Deliver Docs Without A Printer Or Scanner

1 hour ago by Jolie O'Dell3

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If you’ve ever had to get a signed document from Point A to a distant Point B, you know the frustration and expense of that soul-sucking task. If you’d like to accomplish it without so much as printing a page, let alone running a dozen errands or trying to email an enormous PDF,HelloFax is your killer app.

Sending documents to fax numbers isn’t a big challenge these days — and that’s not HelloFax’s focus. There are dozens of that let you send faxes online, such as eFax and Fax.com.

But there’s one major sticking point when it comes to contracts, NDAs, permission slips and similar documents: your signature. How does the average Joe or Jane manage to actually sign the digital documents before sending them?

Enter HelloFax, which digitizes the signing process. This removes the need to print out, sign, scan-in and send.

HelloFax, a web-based app, works this way. You go to the site with your document of choice. This could be a PDF, a text file, a Word document, or an image file of just about any kind.

Enter the fax number or email address where the document should go. If you need a cover sheet, you can quickly create one in a pop-up lightbox.

Upload your document, then edit and sign the document as needed. The editing tools are pretty basic; you can add check boxes or text.

The signing options are quite varied. First, you can choose to create your digital signature with a mouse. If you’re as hand-eye coordinated as I am, this will look something like the efforts of a sugar-high 3-year-old. You can also upload an image file of your signature, if you have one.

But there’s a much better option: you can grab a pen, scrawl your John Hancock on a piece of blank paper, and take a picture of that with your smartphone.

HelloFax will let you email that image to them. The site digitizes the image for use in your document as soon as the email is received.

Once you’ve created your signature, you can save it for use on future faxes.

When you’ve finished editing, signing and saving the document, you click to send the fax or email. Once the document is sent, it’s saved in your HelloFax account, just in case you need to download a copy or resend it to another party.

You can send documents to any U.S. fax number. Support for international number is in the works, as is sending the same fax to multiple recipients at the same time.

Best of all, you can fax up to 20 pages free of charge every month, and you can send unlimited signed documents via email. If you deal with a lot of signed and faxed documents — as many entrepreneurs and freelancers do — you can pay a reasonable subscription fee (after a 30-day free trial, of course) to HelloFax your way to a paperless office.

You can fax 50 pages a month for $5; this plan also offers you your own local fax number. Other plans include the $10 per month option (500 pages per month and a toll-free or local number) and a $40 monthly subscription for the heaviest of power users (2,000 fax pages per month and a toll-free or local fax number). Subscription plans can be canceled at any time.

HelloFax is a Y Combinator company. Its founders are Neal O’Mara, formerly a TripIt engineer, and Joseph Walla, who has extensive experience in public service in the U.S. and abroad.

“We built something we needed,” O’Mara and Walla wrote of HelloFax. “Every document was a hassle to sign. It involved a trip to [FedEx Office], printing, scanning, faxing and then being overcharged. An hour later, our document was signed. Not a good use of time.”

The next time you need to sign and send a document, give HelloFax a try, and report back with your experiences. Does this strike you as a useful app for the average person? Let us know in the comments.

(source:http://mashable.com)

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