Numbers
Print, sign, scan, send: what the paper round trip still costs
A PDF arrives. You print it, sign it, scan it, email it back. It feels like five minutes, but the surveys that measured it add up to weeks a year per employee. Here are the numbers, where they come from, and what they leave out.
In a 2022 Adobe survey of 1,500 workers at large UK companies, employees lost more than 28 working days a year each to low-value paperwork such as printing, signing and scanning, and printed about 450 pages a week, at an estimated cost of £490 per person. In a 2019 survey by the Mopria Alliance, 26% of people who sign documents said it was common to receive one electronically, print it, sign it and scan it back. Most of that round trip can be done on a phone in a minute, without breaking the document.
What the surveys found
| Finding | Who and when |
|---|---|
| 28+ working days a year lost per employee to printing, stapling, signing and scanning; 43 days in financial services | Adobe, survey of 1,500 workers at large UK businesses, reported September 2022 |
| 450 pages printed per employee per week, about £490 per person; 650 pages and £718 for younger employees | Same Adobe survey |
| 6.8 hours a week on administration such as printing, filling forms and chasing signatures | Adobe, survey of 7,000 European office workers, December 2016 |
| Among people who sign documents: 43% get paper and return paper; 26% get an electronic document, print it, sign it and scan it back; 21% get it electronically and return a hard copy; only 10% get paper and return it electronically. 73% of those returning a scan used the office scanner | Mopria Alliance Workflow Survey, May 2019 |
| 400+ billion PDFs opened in Acrobat products in a year | Adobe, Acrobat’s 30th anniversary, June 2023 |
| Nearly 1.7 million customers of one e-signature service, Docusign | Docusign annual report, fiscal year ended January 31, 2025 |
Read these with care. Most come from companies that sell document or signature software, and several are years old. Definitions differ: one counts all admin work, another only printing and signing. What they agree on is the direction: a lot of signing still goes through paper, and each round trip costs more than it seems.
Where the time actually goes
The signature itself takes seconds. The rest is the round trip around it:
- Finding a printer that works, and paper, and ink.
- Printing pages you’ll never need again, often the whole contract for one signature line.
- Scanning, usually as a photo at an angle, or on a shared scanner that emails you a huge file.
- Shrinking the file because the email bounces. The real limits are 20 to 25 MB.
- Doing it again when a page is missing, crooked or unreadable.
And something gets lost on the way that the surveys don’t count: a printed and rescanned document is a picture. It no longer has form fields, searchable text, or the digital signatures that were on it.
Why people still print
- The PDF isn’t fillable. It’s a flat image of a form. You can still type on it; see filling PDF forms on iPhone.
- Fear of breaking it. People who have seen “signature invalid” once don’t want to see it again. That fear is justified with many apps: here’s why, and how to avoid it.
- “It needs a real signature.” Sometimes a certificate signature is required, which a printout can’t provide anyway. How to sign with a certificate on iPhone.
- Habit, and no good app on the phone.
The round trip, without paper
- Open the PDF from Mail or Files on your phone.
- Type into the fields, or tap where text goes on a flat form.
- Sign with your finger, or with your certificate if one is required.
- Save, check that any existing signature is still valid, and send it back from the same screen.
That’s the whole job. No printer, no scanner, and the file you send is still a real document: searchable, fillable where it should be, with signatures that validate.
Keepsign is built for that round trip on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Fill any form, also flat and XFA ones; sign by hand or with your Digital ID; then Keepsign saves by appending, so signatures already in the file stay valid, and gives you a receipt that says so. Review before sending checks for empty required fields and size before you hit Share. Filling, signing and the receipt are free. Sign without breaking.
Sources
- Startups Magazine, “UK employees waste 28 days a year collating, printing, and signing documents”, September 9, 2022, reporting Adobe research with 1,500 workers: startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-uk-employees-waste-28-days-year-collating-printing-and-signing-documents
- Adobe Blog, “European companies lose out due to poor document processes”, December 2, 2016: blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2016/12/02/european-companies-lose-out-due-to-poor-document-processes
- Mopria Alliance, “Mopria Workflow Survey Finds High Use Rate of Physical Paper”, press release, May 2019: mopria.org/Documents/MopriaWorkflowSurveyPressReleaseFinal.pdf
- Adobe Blog, “Celebrating 30 years of digital transformation with Adobe Acrobat”, June 15, 2023: blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/06/15/celebrating-30-years-of-digital-transformation-with-adobe-acrobat
- Docusign, Inc., Form 10-K for fiscal 2025, filed with the SEC: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1261333/000126133325000024/docu-20250131.htm