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The Evening Spent Chasing Signatures

A contract, a quote and a delivery note all need a signature before tomorrow, and the signatories are on the road. Why signature-chasing drifts into the evening, and what a clear signing route gives back.

Mellorca Moments2026-10-04

It is a quarter to eight in the evening. The tender closes at ten tomorrow morning. The bid document needs two directors' signatures. One director is at a family function and has said she will look at it "later". The other is driving back from Bloemfontein and cannot open attachments on his phone. The administrator who is responsible for getting it all in has sent four WhatsApp messages, two emails and made one call. She is still waiting.

Earlier in the day the same thing happened with a supplier agreement and a customer's signed quote. Each one needed somebody's signature, and each signature was somewhere else.

The scene is an illustrative scenario set in a small Free State engineering contractor, not a real company, but its parts will be familiar to many small businesses.

This piece is about that evening: not the signatories, who are usually busy for good reasons, but the person whose job is to collect what they sign.

Signing has been allowed to change, but the route often has not

South African law has recognised electronic signatures for more than two decades. Section 13 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002 provides that an electronic signature is not without legal force and effect merely because it is in electronic form. It also says that where a law requires a person's signature and does not specify the type, that requirement is met for an electronic document only if an advanced electronic signature is used. The Act does not give validity to certain transactions it lists in a schedule, and it has been amended since 2002. So electronic signing is not a universal answer: some documents need a particular kind of signature, and some need advice. For a great many everyday business documents, however, the barrier to signing on a phone is not the law.

The tools are also widely available. Microsoft's Teams documentation, for example, describes e-signature requests created through its Approvals app with third-party providers such as Adobe Sign and DocuSign, with the requests and responses logged for audit. Business software commonly includes approval workflows with reminders for overdue requests and delegation to a substitute when the usual approver is unavailable. Other vendors offer similar features.

And yet many businesses still collect signatures by printing, signing, scanning and sending, coordinated by one person through chat messages. The friction is less about technology than about how the signing route is designed.

Why the chasing happens in the evening

Microsoft's Work Trend Index analysis of anonymised Microsoft 365 activity found that workers send or receive more than 50 messages outside business hours on average, and that meetings after 8pm were up 16% year on year. These are global figures from one vendor's data, not a South African measurement. They do suggest that the evening is already a place where work overflows.

Signatures drift there for specific reasons:

  • Signatories are only free after hours. Directors and owners spend the day with customers and on site, so the first moment they could sign is the evening.
  • Deadlines are set by others. Tenders, bank applications and customer orders close when they close. If the signing route is slow, the gap is closed by someone's evening.
  • Documents arrive late in the chain. When drafting, pricing and checking take most of the day, signing becomes the last step before a deadline.
  • Nobody knows the order. Without a defined route, the administrator works out on the night who must sign, in what order and how.
  • There is no stand-in. If only one person may sign, everything waits for them, wherever they are.

Mellorca has looked at how one sign-off can stall a whole piece of work in why one approval holds up an entire process and when one missing item stops a larger process.

The human tax: time and presence

The time cost is the evening itself: an hour or two of messages, reminders and rescanning, often more on a deadline day. The presence cost may be larger. Waiting for a reply is a kind of work that cannot be put down. The administrator may be at home, cooking or sitting with family, but part of their attention is on the phone, watching for the director's reply, ready to resend a file that will not open.

That kind of waiting is close to what is described in the inbox that follows you home, but more concentrated: one task, one deadline, and other people's timetables. Not everyone experiences it as a burden; some people are glad to see a deadline met and do not mind the evening. Mellorca does not presume how any individual feels. The point is that the evening was not chosen, it was required by the way signing works.

What could change

  1. Define the signing route in advance. For each common document type, write down who signs, in what order and by what method. The administrator then sends the document into a known route instead of improvising one at night.
  2. Use electronic signing where the law and the counterparty allow it. A signature request that opens properly on a phone removes printing and scanning. Where a law requires a signature of an unspecified type, check whether an advanced electronic signature is needed, and take advice for documents the Act excludes.
  3. Delegate authority within limits. A written delegation that allows a second director or senior manager to sign certain documents up to a value removes the dependency on one person.
  4. Move signing earlier. Build the timeline back from the deadline so that signing happens a day before, not the morning of. Most of the evening chasing is a planning problem.
  5. Let the system remind, not the person. Automated reminders sent during working hours replace the administrator's evening messages, and show everyone where the document is waiting.

In the illustrative tender, a defined route agreed a week earlier, electronic signing on both directors' phones, and a target to have the document signed the day before closing might have turned the evening into a five-minute task at four in the afternoon.

Trade-offs

  • Cost and setup. Electronic signing services have subscription costs and need someone to configure templates and signatories.
  • Not every document qualifies. Some agreements require advanced electronic signatures or other formalities. Getting this wrong could create a legal problem bigger than an evening.
  • Delegation increases risk. Allowing more people to sign spreads authority, which needs limits, records and trust.
  • Reminders can move the pressure. Automated reminders sent to signatories at night simply shift the after-hours burden from one person to another. Schedule them sensibly.

Why it matters

The business case for a clear signing route is fewer missed deadlines and cleaner records. The human case is about the person in the middle. When signatures follow a known path, earlier in the day, with delegation and reminders built in, the evening stops being the place where the business's paperwork gets finished.

That is the dividend: time returned, and presence too. The administrator can be wherever they are in the evening without half their mind on whether a director has opened the file.

Sources and further reading

Related Mellorca reading

Article summaryA contract, a quote and a delivery note all need a signature before tomorrow, and the signatories are on the road. Why signature-chasing drifts into the evening, and what a clear signing route gives back.
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