Google has announced an open beta of its eSignature capability in Google Workspace. The new feature will be available for Google Docs and Google Drive for individual and various group accounts.

The feature is designed for small businesses, where keeping track of contracts, customer agreements, and other binding documents can be challenging.

“To help streamline this workflow, we’re natively integrating eSignature in Google Docs, allowing you to request and add signatures to official contracts, directly in Google Docs,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.

eSignature makes it easier to:

• Quickly request signatures, see the status of pending signatures, and find completed contracts.
• Sign an official contract right from Google Drive without having to switch apps or tabs.
• Create a new copy of the contract for each request so that you can use your document as a template and initiate multiple eSignatures requests. 

Additional details to be introduced later this year will include:

• Audit trail: all completed contracts will automatically contain an audit trail report.
• Multi-signer: the ability to request a signature from more than one user.
• Non-Gmail users: the ability to request an eSignature from non-Gmail users
• Initiating eSignature on PDF: the ability to initiate an eSignature on PDF files stored in Drive