Every principal contractor has the same folder: risk assessments and method statements going back and forth with subcontractors, operatives signing to say they have been briefed, all of it getting filed. On most sites that round trip runs on paper and a phone camera. It works, right up until somebody asks a question about it.
The question is rarely “did you have RAMS?” You did. It is “can you show this person had them, in this version, before they started?” That is a different problem, and a photograph of a signature does not answer it.
Larger contractors answer it with a dedicated RAMS or site-management platform, and if you already have one, use it. This page is for the firm that does not: too small for a platform, still printing method statements and photographing signatures, and wanting the sign-off to stand up without buying a system to get it.
Why the paper round trip fails under scrutiny
A signed sheet photographed on site carries almost no verifiable information. It shows a mark on a page. It does not show when the mark was made, whether the sheet photographed is the version that was issued, or whether anything was changed after the fact. All of that is recoverable on a good day with a well-kept folder. None of it is provable.
The specific ways it comes apart:
- Version drift. A method statement gets revised on Tuesday. Three operatives signed Monday’s. The folder holds one PDF and six signatures, and nothing records which sheet each person actually read.
- Backdating, or the appearance of it. A sheet signed on Thursday and dated Monday looks identical to one genuinely signed on Monday, so a genuine sheet carries the same doubt. That ambiguity works against you, not for you.
- The photograph is not the document. A WhatsApp image is a re-encoded, cropped, metadata-stripped copy of a piece of paper. It is evidence that a photograph exists.
- The folder is one wet cab away from gone. Site paperwork lives in a van, a site cabin, or somebody’s phone gallery among two thousand other photos.
What sending RAMS through Pixasign changes
The workflow is the same shape. You send the RAMS, the subcontractor opens it on whatever phone they have, reads it, signs, and it comes back. Nobody downloads an app and nobody creates an account. They tap a link in an email.
What is different is what you are left holding afterwards.
Pixasign gives each signed document a cryptographic seal, and the seal carries an independent timestamp issued by DigiCert. That second part matters more than it sounds. A timestamp is only worth anything if somebody other than you attests the time, which is why the seal time comes from DigiCert and not from us. DigiCert is an independent timestamp authority, and its attestation of when the document was sealed is embedded in the PDF itself. The time of each earlier step is recorded by our server on the evidence certificate.
Alongside the sealed PDF you get an evidence certificate: who signed, the address it went to, their IP and approximate location, the device, the full timeline down to the second, and digital fingerprints of the document before and after sealing. The events are hash-chained, so each one locks in the one before it. The chain’s final value is printed on the evidence certificate every party is sent, so a later change to the record would not match their copy.
| The question | Signed sheet, photographed | Sealed through Pixasign |
|---|---|---|
| Which version did they sign? | Whichever was in the folder, probably | A digital fingerprint of the exact file |
| When did they sign it? | The date they wrote | Recorded to the second, and the sealed document carries a DigiCert timestamp |
| Has it changed since? | No way to tell | Change a byte the seal covers and it breaks; anything added later shows as a change at pixasign.co.uk/check |
| Can someone else confirm it? | They have to trust your folder | Anyone can check it, free, without an account |
| Where is it in two years? | A van, a site cabin, a phone gallery | Downloaded, with the seal inside the file |
Technical details
The seal is a PAdES document timestamp, the standard set out in ETSI EN 319 142: an RFC 3161 timestamp issued by DigiCert over the whole file, RSA-4096 with SHA-384, with long-term validation (LTV) data embedded in the PDF. The fingerprints on the evidence certificate are SHA-256 hashes.
Checkable by anyone, and that is deliberate
The seal and its timestamp are embedded in the PDF itself, and anyone can check a document free at pixasign.co.uk/check: drop or choose a file and it tells you whether Pixasign sealed it and whether it has changed since. No account, no login, and it works for anyone: a customer, an insurer, a solicitor, someone who has never used Pixasign.
This is the point most worth understanding. Evidence that only works while you keep paying a supplier is not evidence you control. Download the signed PDFs and their certificates whenever you like: the seal and its timestamp stay inside the file, and pixasign.co.uk/check keeps recognising every file Pixasign sealed.
Pricing, for a business where everybody sends paperwork
Most e-signature tools charge per user. On a site that is the wrong shape entirely: the contracts manager sends RAMS, so does the site manager, so does whoever is covering on Friday. Per-seat pricing means either paying for everyone or sharing a login, and sharing a login destroys the audit trail you bought the thing for.
Pixasign is free for 1 user and 3 documents a month, then a flat monthly price with unlimited users: £19 a month for 50 documents, £59 for 200, £99 for 500, all inc VAT. The price you see is the price you pay. Unlimited users means no charge per user: an account starts with room for 200 active people, and we raise that free on request. Add the whole team. Your subcontractors never pay anything and never need an account.
Send one and see
Free for 3 documents a month, no card. Send a real RAMS to a real subcontractor, let them sign it on a phone, and look at the evidence certificate that comes back.
Start free UK company. Documents stored in the EEA.Questions
- Is an electronically signed RAMS acceptable?
- Electronic signatures are valid and enforceable for the vast majority of business documents under UK law, and RAMS acceptance is an ordinary business record rather than one of the narrow categories with special formality requirements. What matters in practice is whether you can evidence who accepted what and when, which is exactly the part a sealed document does better than paper. If a specific customer contract or scheme requires a particular form of sign-off, follow that; check it with whoever handles your compliance rather than taking a supplier’s word for it, ours included.
- What if the subcontractor has no signal on site?
- Send it the night before. The link stays live for fourteen days, so it can be read and signed in the yard, at home, or anywhere with a bar of signal, which is usually easier than getting a printed sheet back anyway.
- Can I send the same RAMS to several operatives?
- Yes. Add up to 20 people to the same document, each with their own signature field, and each gets their own link. The certificate records each person separately: when they opened it, when they signed, and from where. The document is sealed once the last person signs, so if operatives sign on different days, send each of them their own copy and each one is sealed as soon as it is signed.
- What happens to my documents if I stop paying?
- Nothing is deleted. Your account moves to the Free plan, so you can still view, download and check everything already signed, and send up to 3 documents a month. Documents you sent earlier in the same month count towards it. Anything already out for signature still completes. The sealed PDFs and certificates you have downloaded are unaffected, because the seal and its timestamp are embedded in the PDF itself.