The true cost of manual back-office audits

A single manual check hardly seems like a major cost factor. Searching for a company in the registry, verifying information, checking signing authorizations, reviewing a signed contract—perhaps just a few steps before the process continues.

But this work is rarely a one-off. When onboarding new customers, suppliers, or business partners, it repeats itself over and over again. With each additional transaction, there are more registry queries, data reconciliations, and document reviews. On top of that, there are follow-up inquiries, corrections, and wait times when information is unclear or a signing rule has been overlooked.

The actual costs, therefore, do not necessarily lie in the duration of a single review. They arise from the constant repetition of tasks that could be standardized, tied-up back-office capacity, and the fact that the manual effort grows along with the volume of business.

Many companies have long since digitized the visible part of their B2B onboarding: forms are online, contracts are sent electronically and signed digitally. But behind the scenes, manual work often still begins.

This is because, before a company can be activated or a contract concluded, key questions must be clarified: Does the company actually exist? Is this the correct legal entity? Who is authorized to represent it? What signing rules apply? And if the contract is returned: Who actually signed it, is the signature valid, and has the document been altered?

When small checks turn into a scalability problem

For a single transaction, this sounds manageable. Someone opens a registry, searches for the company, verifies signing authorizations, checks the signed document, and documents the result.

This process becomes a problem when it is repeated hundreds or thousands of times. Then the back-office workload grows, onboarding slows down, and skilled staff remain tied up in tasks that could be standardized.

The key point, therefore, is not whether a review takes ten or fifteen minutes. Such durations vary from case to case. What matters is whether every additional business partner triggers an additional manual review process.

A real-world use case illustrates just how large this scale can become: Approximately 200,000 contracts were reviewed using an API-based, AI-powered solution. The benefit lies less in a flat-rate time savings per contract than in the ability to automatically process a review volume of this magnitude.

From manual checks to automated processes

With Swisscom’s Business Identity Validator and Document Validator, such checks can be integrated directly into existing digital workflows.

The Business Identity Validator is used during the onboarding of a company. Company data can be retrieved from official registries via an API. In Switzerland, these include Zefix, the UID register, and the cantonal commercial registers. This makes it possible to determine the correct legal entity, the company’s status, and the registered details. In addition, authorized signatories and the applicable signing rules can be verified.

This transforms manual look-up work into a structured process: identify the company, retrieve official data, determine authorized signatories, and have the contract signed.

Who actually signed?

After signing, the Document Validator performs a technical verification of the document. It can extract the signers’ identities and verify the signature type and validity, the timestamp, and the document’s integrity.

The Business Identity Validator addresses the business-related question: Was this person authorized to sign on behalf of this specific company, and were the applicable signing rules followed?

This distinction is important. A digital signature can be technically valid without being sufficient for the company in question. For example, if a collective signature is required, a contract may be incompletely signed despite having a valid signature.

The document remains within the company

Especially with confidential contracts, the specific data being transmitted is critical. With the Document Validator, the complete PDF does not need to be sent to Swisscom. The document content remains within the customer’s environment; hash and signature information are used for validation.

This allows document verification to be automated without having to send the contract content outside the company’s own environment for the verification step.

Higher volume, not more back-office work

The real benefit lies not in faster individual checks, but in a different approach to onboarding. Standardizable checks run in the background and feed structured results back into the existing process. Specialists can focus on exceptions, conflicting data, or complex substitution rules.

Digital onboarding is only truly digital when not only forms and signatures are electronic, but also the validation processes behind them. The Business Identity Validator and the Document Validator provide two combinable building blocks for this: One clarifies which company you’re dealing with and who is authorized to represent it. The other verifies who actually signed and whether the signed document is technically valid.

This transforms a hidden manual back-office task into a scalable part of the digital process.

Learn more in our white paper on automating B2B onboarding checks about how you can automate standard checks and have your subject-matter experts focus solely on deciding on genuine exceptions.

Customer success stories

Customer success stories

The true cost of manual back-office audits

When small checks turn into a scalability problem

From manual checks to automated processes

Who actually signed?

The document remains within the company

Higher volume, not more back-office work

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