E-signatures for accountants and tax preparers: get engagement letters signed before the rush

The first billable task of tax season isn't a return — it's getting every client to sign an engagement letter. Until that's done, you're doing work you technically haven't been retained for, and no accountant wants to discover a scope or fee dispute in April. The bottleneck is almost never writing the letter; it's collecting a signature from a client who's busy, remote, and doesn't own a printer. Here's how accounting and tax practices use e-signature to clear the season's paperwork in days instead of weeks — without an enterprise platform's bill.

The documents a practice sends every season

A tax or accounting practice runs on a short, repeatable stack of client paperwork:

• Engagement letters — the scope-and-fee agreement that has to be signed before work starts, sent to every client, every year.
• §7216 disclosure consents — the client's written consent to use or disclose their tax-return information, required before you can share it.
• Organizers and questionnaires — the intake packet clients confirm and sign.
• Representation authorizations — power-of-attorney and information-authorization forms for dealing with a tax agency on the client's behalf.
• W-9 requests — collected from vendors and contractors (general information — confirm current form requirements).

Every one is a PDF you send, place a few fields on, and route to one or two people — exactly the send-and-sign workflow Signed is built around.

Why the engagement letter can't wait

An unsigned engagement letter is unbilled, unprotected work. Every day a client sits on it is a day you're either stalling their return or starting it at your own risk. The friction is rarely the letter — it's the mechanics of signing it: printing a multi-page agreement assumes the client owns a printer, and a signing portal that makes them create an account adds a hoop at the worst possible moment. On Signed, the client gets an email, taps the link, and signs in their browser with no account and nothing to install. An engagement letter sent at 9am can be signed before lunch, and the return is officially yours to work.

The fields an engagement letter needs

The paperwork asks for a small, predictable set of fields:

• Signature — the client's, and yours or the firm's countersignature.
• Date signed — fills automatically, so the engagement's effective date is unambiguous.
• Text — client name, entity name, and the tax year the letter covers.
• Checkbox — acknowledgments for the fee schedule, the §7216 consent, or a responsibilities notice the client confirms they've read.
• Initials — for per-page acknowledgment on longer engagement or organizer packets.

You drag each field onto the finished PDF and assign it to the right person; the full field reference is in Sending & signing. Draft the letter wherever you like, then export it to a PDF — what you upload is exactly what the client signs.

Send it to both spouses — in order or together

A joint return means two signers on the engagement letter. You can send to both spouses in parallel, or set a signing order if one should sign before the other and before your countersignature. Each person is emailed when it's their turn, and only the individual whose action is pending gets reminded. The deeper mechanics of routing one document to several people are in how to collect signatures from multiple people.

One honest caveat: IRS e-file authorizations

Be careful here, because this is where a general e-signature tool has a real limit. Remotely e-signing an IRS e-file authorization (Form 8879) requires the specific identity-verification step the IRS mandates — knowledge-based authentication (KBA) — and Signed deliberately does not provide KBA or SMS identity verification. So Signed is a fine fit for engagement letters, §7216 consents, and organizers; for a remotely signed 8879 you'll need a tool that performs the required identity check, or collect that signature in person. Everyday business agreements are enforceable under the US ESIGN Act and UETA — the groundwork is in are electronic signatures legally binding? — but tax-authority forms carry their own rules. (General information, not legal or tax advice — follow current IRS guidance and your professional standards.)

Template it once, send it to every client

Your engagement letter barely changes from client to client — the name, entity, tax year, and fee do; the terms don't. Set it up once as a reusable template with the fields placed and signer roles defined, and each new send takes thirty seconds: pick the template, type the client's details, send. For a practice onboarding dozens of clients in a six-week window, this is where the hours come back — the full workflow is in reusable e-signature templates.

Chase the stragglers automatically

Some clients always sign on the last possible day. Instead of personally emailing each one, turn on automatic reminders so anyone who hasn't signed gets a scheduled, neutral nudge — and set an expiration date if a consent or authorization needs to be in hand before a filing deadline. Working a stalled batch is covered in how to chase unsigned documents.

The record that protects your practice

If a client ever disputes a fee or a scope decision, "did they sign the engagement letter?" is a question you want answered by evidence, not memory. Every completed document on Signed ships with a tamper-evident Certificate of Completion — each signer's email, timestamps, and IP for every action, sealed against later edits (what's in it). And when you just need to sign something yourself, the free self-sign tool handles that with no account.

What it costs a practice

Signed is $9.99 per seat per month — one plan, unlimited documents, month-to-month, no annual lock-in. A seat covers each preparer doing the sending; clients never need an account or a seat. That matters for accounting, where volume is intensely seasonal: an annual commitment or a per-document cap punishes exactly the six weeks you send the most. Compared with the incumbent's annual-committed, envelope-capped plans, the math is stark — see DocuSign pricing explained, the side-by-side on the DocuSign comparison page, and pricing.

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