CERFRANCE Alliance Centre is one of 73 entities in the CERFRANCE national network of chartered accountants, spread across 28 branches in 5 French departments. Thanks to Namirial’s electronic signature, the company has fully digitized the production chain of its annual financial reports.
Altogether, CERFRANCE Alliance Centre has 600 employees who manage the accounting of around 11,600 clients every year. One of the company’s missions is to provide its clients with accounting IT tools, maintain them, and enhance them.
11,600
annual reports signed each year
48h
to deliver annual accounts to clients
600
employees at CERFRANCE Alliance Centre
From Handwritten Signature to Electronic Signature
Each year, branches in the network deliver a document officially presenting the company’s annual results to their clients, traditionally in paper form and hand-signed by chartered accountants. This process involved several steps: finalizing the document, printing, verification and handwritten signature by the accountant, and paper delivery by mail or in-person visit.
An increasing number of clients wanted a digital version of these documents, for example to send them to their bankers. Given their official nature, simply emailing PDFs was not an option.
“When we launched this project, our goal was to enrich our offering by systematically providing clients with digital versions of these documents, in addition to the paper version. Given their official nature, we couldn’t simply email plain PDFs.”
— Bertrand Blond, Director of Information Systems and Client IT Solutions at CERFRANCE Alliance Centre
To achieve this goal, the CER Sign project was built around a clear decision: fully replace the handwritten signature step with an electronic signature step within a production workflow, with a key benefit — providing clients with financial reports carrying an electronic signature, confirming the accountants’ commitment to the accuracy of the figures presented.
A Redesigned Workflow for Express Document Delivery
CERFRANCE Alliance Centre’s IT department was looking for signing software that could easily integrate into its document publishing workflow. They chose Namirial‘s CUTE module, which allows for simple integration of electronic signature features within a business application, using any certificate — in this case, the SIGNEXPERT keys issued by the French Order of Chartered Accountants.
Following the project, the process was fully redesigned:
- Finalizing the client file by the accountant and electronically generating the documents.
- Electronic approval request sent to the chartered accountant responsible for the file.
- Verification: the accountant logs into their web interface to review pending documents.
- Electronic signature via the SIGNEXPERT USB key, applying both the electronic signature and a scanned image of the accountant’s handwritten signature.
- Automatic electronic delivery via the secure extranet, with SMS notification to the client.
- Printing and paper delivery following the same process as before, alongside the digital version.
- Archiving of the signed document within CERFRANCE Alliance’s document management system.
“Thanks to rewriting this process, we can now guarantee delivery of our clients’ annual accounts within 48 hours, allowing them to easily and quickly send them to their banking partners and/or suppliers in a fully secure way.”
— Bertrand Blond, Director of Information Systems and Client IT Solutions at CERFRANCE Alliance Centre
Within a few days, Namirial‘s teams delivered a customized signing web interface, branded with CERFRANCE Alliance’s colors and built on the CUTE module. It shows each accountant the list of documents awaiting signature, along with the certificates detected on the machine; signing a document takes just one click, and the signed document is then placed in an output folder accessible for the rest of the workflow.
To carry out this project and choose the right partner, Bertrand Blond left nothing to chance, evaluating the technical quality of the products, the company’s financial history, and its client portfolio. Among all these criteria, responsiveness, flexibility, and professionalism in exchanges were decisive in choosing Namirial. The ability to insert a scanned handwritten signature image within documents, along with compatibility with SIGNEXPERT certificates, also weighed heavily in favor of the solution.
Considerable Benefits from Every Angle
The CER Sign system is now in production, allowing all CERFRANCE Alliance chartered accountants to sign the 11,600 financial reports produced each year.
Digital signature has intelligently replaced handwritten signature without fully eliminating it: each accountant’s signature remains visible at the bottom of every document, whether paper or digital.
“Thanks to this project, our production chain now outputs official digital documents that replace their paper equivalents while carrying genuine legal value and an irrefutable presumption of authenticity. We can distribute them quickly, store them, index them, archive them, print them…”
— Bertrand Blond, Director of Information Systems and Client IT Solutions at CERFRANCE Alliance Centre
As a result, digital reports are delivered to clients much faster via the extranet, and there is now full consistency between the information in the paper and digital versions.
CERFRANCE Alliance Centre enjoys a considerably strengthened image with its clients in terms of its ability to innovate, and today the company is rolling out systematic electronic signature across all digital deliverables made available to clients.
Disclaimer: this success story was originally produced and published by Signaturit Group. Following the integration of Signaturit into the Namirial Group, it is now hosted on the Namirial website for archival and informational purposes. The results, figures, branding, and product references reflect the customer experience at the time of original publication and may no longer represent current offerings or outcomes.