Sending your first request

A signature request holds the documents you need signed and the people who need to sign them. Everything else in this product follows from those two lists.

Composing it

Start from New under Signing. On a phone, New opens a version made for a small screen, where you can scan paper pages, choose a PDF or start from a template; see Sending a request from your phone. On a computer or a tablet, everything a request is made of is on one screen: the email across the top, who signs and in what order, and the documents. Nothing is created until you do something on it, so opening it and leaving costs nothing; after that, everything you do is saved as you go and the request waits in Drafts.

• The email. A subject and a message to everyone. Use an email template fills the subject, the message and the tags from one you have saved, and Manage email templates is where they are kept. Set a due date, how often to chase, and any tags.
• Who signs, and in what order. Each signing step is a box of people. Everyone in a step gets their link at the same time, and the next step only once they have finished. + Add person searches your contacts; a search that finds nobody offers + Add new contact, which saves them to your contacts too unless you untick that for a one-off. Drag a card between steps to change the order, or use Move in its menu, and + Add a signing step makes a new one. Each card shows the person's identity check, and its menu can ask them to sign or view everything, open their contact, or take them off the request.
• Documents. Drag PDFs onto the box or choose files; a PDF is frozen as it is added, because it arrived finished. + Start from a template adds a document from the library or one your workspace wrote. Under each person, None, View or Sign says what they are asked to do with that document.
• Replace file on a PDF's row swaps in a corrected copy and keeps its title, who signs it and its boxes. Once boxes are placed, the new file must have the same number of pages, each the same size and the same way up, or the boxes would land in the wrong places; before then, any PDF will do.
• A template document shows how many answers it still needs. Fill in opens its questions beside the document itself; Done there finishes it, and a document is frozen the moment it is finished: the file stored is the file everyone signs. To change an answer afterwards, press Fill in again: the finished copy is taken back and a fresh one made when you are done, so any boxes placed on it need placing again.
• Place boxes opens its own screen and comes back. Boxes go on finished pages, so a template document is filled in first.
• Review and send lists what will happen before anything leaves.
• Start over deletes the draft, after asking, while nothing has been sent.

Before you send

The request will refuse to send if anything would leave somebody unable to do what they have been asked to do. A recipient with no email address, an identity check by text with no mobile number to send it to, a check whose channel is not set up, a gap in the signing order, and a document nobody has been asked to act on are all refusals rather than warnings, and each one names what is wrong.

A document with a signing line that has no box behind it is refused as well, and the refusal names the page. That line was put there by a signing box in the wording, and without a box nobody's mark would land on it. Place a box on it under Place boxes, or press Fill in and then Done on the document again, which places every box the wording asks for.

A document that would go out with a placeholder still showing in it is refused too, and the refusal names them. The frozen copy cannot be corrected, so what clears it is pressing Fill in on it: that copy is taken back, you answer what is missing, and a fresh one is made when you press Done.

What it does not check is whether you asked for everything you meant to. A recipient you added but gave no task to is treated as deliberate (the record is meant to be able to show that somebody was purposely not asked) so they are simply not part of the request, and no link is ever sent to them.

One more refusal exists and most workspaces never meet it. If this workspace is on a plan, and it has used every envelope that plan includes, and that plan has no rate for going past the allowance, the send is refused until the allowance starts again, and the refusal names both the plan's own limit and the date. No plan sold here works that way: every one of them prices the overage, so going past the allowance costs money and never stops you working. A workspace on no plan is not counted at all and never meets this.

Looking at a document before it goes

Every document on a request has a Preview beside it. That is the frozen file itself, read back out of storage - not a fresh rendering of it - so what you see there is what the signer will see, down to the page size and the line breaks. Placeholders that nothing filled appear exactly as they will in the signer's copy, with the list of them named above the document rather than marked inside it.

Preview creates nothing and changes nothing. It is also where to check that the signature boxes are where you meant them, at a size you can actually read.

After you send

The first group of recipients is sent their link, if a mail server is configured. If none is, nothing is sent and the request page gives you the link to pass on yourself; it says so at the time, so you are not left waiting.

Later groups are sent theirs only when the group before them has finished. Their links do not exist until then, so one cannot be used early even if it is forwarded.