How do I get a partner who still wants fax to accept an e-signature instead?

Who still asks for fax and how to respond

Fax hangs on in a narrower set of situations than most people expect, and it's worth knowing which category you're actually dealing with before assuming it's a hard requirement.

• Older internal systems at larger institutions. Some banks, insurance companies, and government offices still route certain forms through fax because that's how an internal process was built years or decades ago, not because the document type legally requires it. The person asking for a fax is often just following their own employer's internal process, not a law.
• A genuine regulatory or procedural requirement. A small number of specific processes, certain medical records requests, some court filings, some government benefit applications, do specify fax or physical delivery in their own rules. This is real but much rarer than the volume of fax requests would suggest.
• Pure habit on the other party's side. Many fax requests come from someone who's simply never been asked to accept an alternative, not from any actual requirement. A fair number of these resolve the moment you ask directly.

The practical first move, regardless of which category you suspect you're in: ask directly, "would a signed PDF or an e-signature work instead of fax for this?" This single question resolves a surprising share of fax requests, since the person asking often has no actual stake in the delivery method itself, fax is just the default they've always used.

Steps to move someone off fax

1. Ask directly whether an alternative is acceptable, rather than assuming fax is non-negotiable and routing around the question entirely.
2. If they're unsure, offer a signed PDF as the lowest-friction middle step. Many people and organizations who ask for "a fax" really just want a document with a signature on it that they can keep on file, and a signed PDF attached to an email satisfies that without needing an actual fax machine on either end. To sign one right now, see how to sign a PDF yourself for free.
3. If they want something more formal, offer an e-signature with a real audit trail. For anyone specifically concerned about authenticity or tampering, which is sometimes the real underlying worry behind a fax preference, explain that an e-signature tool actually produces a stronger, timestamped, verifiable record than a faxed signature ever did, a faxed signature is just as easy to forge or alter as a scanned one, arguably easier, since fax image quality is often worse. On whether paper still wins, see electronic signature vs wet signature.
4. If they genuinely require fax by a specific documented rule, ask them to point to it. This isn't confrontational, it's a reasonable request, and it often surfaces that the "requirement" was actually just the office's own habitual process rather than an actual external rule.
5. If fax is truly required, use an online fax service rather than a physical machine. Numerous online services convert a digital document into a fax transmission without needing an actual fax machine, letting you satisfy a genuine fax requirement without reintroducing the rest of the printing and scanning hassle.

What to do for stubborn partners

Occasionally you'll hit someone, or some institution, that genuinely won't budge regardless of how reasonable the alternative is. A few honest options at that point:

• Accept it as a documented exception, not a failure. If one specific partner out of dozens genuinely requires fax, keep a simple, low-effort fallback for that one relationship rather than redesigning your entire signing process around the rare holdout.
• Use an online fax service for that specific case rather than maintaining an actual physical fax machine and the printing habit around it just for one relationship.
• Periodically revisit it. A partner who insisted on fax two years ago may have since updated their own internal systems. A polite "just checking if e-signature works now" every so often occasionally gets a different answer than it did the first time you asked.
• Don't let one holdout undo progress everywhere else. It's tempting to feel like the whole paperless effort is compromised because of one stubborn exception, but a dramatic reduction in fax and scanning across the vast majority of your documents is still a real, meaningful win even with one remaining exception. The wider plan is in how to go paperless as a small business.

Common mistakes replacing fax

• Assuming every "we need a fax" request is non-negotiable. This is the single biggest avoidable mistake, treating an inherited habit as a hard rule without ever asking the person directly whether an alternative works. If they doubt the legal weight, send them a plain guide on whether electronic signatures are legally binding.
• Buying or keeping a physical fax machine "just in case." An online fax service covers the rare genuine case without the ongoing cost, maintenance, and desk space of actual fax hardware.
• Getting frustrated and confrontational when someone insists on fax. A calm, direct question lands better than pushing back hard on something that, from the other person's side, might just be their own office's unquestioned default, not a decision they're personally attached to.
• Forgetting to document which partners genuinely require fax versus which just haven't been asked yet. Without tracking this, you end up re-treating every fax request as an unknown each time rather than building institutional knowledge about which relationships are actual exceptions.

A quick worked example

Say a client's insurance provider has always required a faxed copy of a specific authorization form. Before assuming that's set in stone, call and ask directly whether a signed PDF or e-signature would be accepted instead. If the person on the phone says yes (which happens more often than expected, since many such requirements turn out to be the office's own habit rather than an actual rule), sign it through an e-signature tool and send the completed document by email, done, with no fax involved at all going forward. If they say the policy genuinely requires fax specifically, use an online fax service to transmit the digital, already-signed document, satisfying the requirement without ever touching a physical fax machine or printer yourself. Either way, the document itself was already signed digitally and sits properly filed in your own system, fax or no fax, so switching to an online fax service for the last mile of delivery loses none of the organizational benefit the rest of this pack covers.

How I'd approach this

The mistake I see most isn't anything technical, it's assuming a fax request is a hard requirement without ever actually asking whether it is. A surprising share of these resolve with one direct question, and the ones that don't almost always have a workaround, an online fax service, that avoids reintroducing the actual printing and scanning hassle even when fax itself can't be fully eliminated. For a business still dealing with a handful of these legacy requirements across different partners, I help map out which ones are genuine and which are just inherited habit, and set up the right workaround for each rather than treating "we still have to fax sometimes" as a reason to keep the whole process paper-based. Get in touch if that's useful for your business.