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Your business partner just realized he needs your signature on an important client contract that will impress the venture capitalist he’s meeting in two hours. Unfortunately, you just headed off on a well-deserved vacation to a remote mountain cabin. And let’s imagine everyone involved is the buttoned-up type who needs more than a handshake and a promise. Do you really want to divert yourself through one tiny town after another until you can find a random stranger willing to let you use her printer and fax machine so you can send the document on its way?

Or, closer to home, let’s say you forgot to sign your middle schooler’s permission slip to attend an important field trip, and said kid is pretty miffed at you. What do you do?

Use it as a chance to build up the tough love and teach your kid that “tsk, stuff happens” and get back to what you were doing? Feel guilt-tripped enough to excuse yourself from work, and then drive halfway across town in crazy traffic to sign the permission slip under the gaze of a disapproving school secretary?

What if there were a better way? There is! You can use a digital signature!

Electronic signatures are legally binding in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, throughout the European Union and elsewhere, per the Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN), the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and European Directive (EC/1999/93).

Major players in the digital signature field include Docusign and Echosign. This is just the first in a series of ongoing posts on innovative ways to sign-and-send, without needing an envelope, stamp, fax machine or courier service. Watch this space for more on this topic.

SignEasy just turned three this summer, but this company has some pretty advanced features for a toddler.

Start by downloading the SignEasy app, and then create an account with a valid email address. Next, you’ll log in to create your signature and save it. From there, it’s just three easy steps: import, sign and send!

IMPORT

No matter where it lives, you just import the document in any of a few easy ways:

If someone emails you a document, just tap on the attachment and select SignEasy as the Open In option. (You know, like “Open in Safari” or “Open in Microsoft Word.”)

You can also forward it to add@getsigneasy.com from the email address set as your SignEasy username.

Or, if you want to import the document from Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Box or some other file storage app/accounts, just open it, select the option of “Send to” or “Export to” and then tap on SignEasy.

No matter how you import it, the document will appear in the “My Documents” section of your SignEasy app.

SignEasy supports PDFs as well as all the Microsoft Office (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT), Apple Pages and OpenOffice formats, images (JPG, BMP, PNG, TIFF), Text, HTML, RTF, and CSV. With the most recent release, SignEasy can handle importing filenames containing native alphabets or scripts in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Hebrew.

SIGN

Once you’ve got your “paperwork” in front of you on your phone, tablet or other gadget, sign the document using a stylus or your finger. (Don’t turn this into a blonde joke; don’t use a real pen.) I suggest using a narrow-tipped stylus so that your signature will look more “real” and reflect the types of signatures on other documents you’ve signed, just in case there are any legal questions later on.

The app will let you adjust the color and size of your signature to your preferences, either on an ad hoc basis or to create a default. You can also use the security settings to password-protect your signature so nobody can steal your John or Jane Hancock.

Complete your document, as necessary, with your initials, the date, any additional text, your company logo and more. You can also insert buttons and checkmarks on the iPhone/iPad version (but not on the Android or Blackberry versions, so far).

Any given document can be signed by up to three signers, including the account holder. If you’ve got a whole board or committee needing to sign off, there’s a slightly kludgy work-around where you get the initial three signatures, and then you reimport the finalized document back to SignEasy and repeat the process.

Offline signing is supported, so you can sign multiple documents and save them as drafts until you’re able and/or ready to send them.

Signatures created with SignEasy are only stored on the mobile device where they are created, never on the server. Signatures “pass through” the server, along with all the rest of a document’s contents, only when users generate the final signed document.

SEND

Email the signed document to whomever needs it, CC it to yourself, or tuck it away in your digital filing cabinet (Dropbox, Evernote, yadda yadda).

PRICING

SignEasy is a free app, and is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. You can sign up to three documents for free each month, too. If you want to sign unlimited documents each month or have cloud storage integration, there’s an annual fee of $29.99 per year for the premium package — about the cost of 65 First Class postage stamps or one or two overnight deliveries. Less frequent users can purchase pay-as-you-go document credits, where $4.99 gets you ten sign-and-sent documents. These plans are designed for individuals/single professionals only, so if you’ve got a whole staff looking to use this, there’s a volume licensing schedule for business and enterprise level usage.

Do you use an electronic signature program or app? Do you have a favorite? Please share your thoughts and concerns in the comments section, below.