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E-signatures: permissions, records and links

11 views · by Kevin J Bruno · updated 1 day ago

This page is for owners, administrators and HR: who can send documents for electronic signature, what is recorded, and how the links behave.

Permissions

  • See documents sent for signature (signing.view): everyone who can see a project can see the signature requests on it, and anyone can see the ones they sent.
  • Send documents for signature (signing.send): project managers and above, and HR. Sending a project file or change order also needs the right to edit that project. Sending a proposal also needs permission to manage proposals.
  • See and look after every document (signing.manage): owners and administrators. They can also send firm documents, which have no project. HR can send firm documents too.

Firms that existed before this feature were given these permissions on their standard roles automatically. Roles a firm made itself are not changed: add the permissions to them in the role editor if you want them to use it.

A document with no project (a firm document) is visible only to the person who sent it and to people who manage signatures.

Plans

Electronic signatures are included on every plan.

How the links work

  • Each person has their own private link. Only a one-way fingerprint of it is stored, so a reminder gives a fresh link and the old one stops working.
  • The sender chooses how long links work, up to 90 days.
  • An access code, if one was set, protects reading as well as signing. Five wrong tries lock that link for 15 minutes.
  • When a document is finished, the links in the finishing emails work for 90 days.
  • Before anyone signs, the document is checked again: if the file was changed, deleted or held by the virus scanner since it was sent, signing is refused.
  • The signer's page and links are throttled, and the page is never indexed by search engines.

What is recorded

  • Every step is written to the document's record (created, sent, opened, signed, declined, reminded, cancelled, expired, completed). Each line covers the one before it, so a change or removal shows as a mismatch on the document's page.
  • The firm's audit log records sending, completing, declining, cancelling and making the certificate.
  • The certificate of completion (a PDF) and a copy of the document as signed are filed in the project's Signed folder, or kept with the signing record when there is no project.

Emails

Three emails can be edited under Settings, Email templates: Document to sign, Document signed by everyone and Document declined.

Webhooks

Under Admin, Developers, subscribe to signing.completed to be told when a document has been signed by everyone. The message carries the document's title, its source (file, change order, proposal or firm), the project if there is one, the document's SHA-256 fingerprint, the completion time and the names and times of the people who signed.

Fields

  • Signature areas, initials, dates, text and tick boxes can be placed on a file or firm document before it is sent (Signatures, then Place fields on a draft). They use the same permissions as sending.
  • The record of events notes when fields were set and, for each signing, how many were filled and a fingerprint of the values. The certificate lists every field and what was filled in.
  • The signed copy kept in the project's Signed folder has the values written on its pages. The original document is never changed. If the values could not be written onto the pages for some reason, the plain copy is kept and the certificate still lists them.
  • The values are written in built-in Western fonts: other alphabets are shown as their nearest Latin letters, or a "?", on the pages (the certificate has the exact text).
  • Some PDFs cannot be written on (newer compressed ones from some tools). The editor says so when fields are placed; the document can still be sent without fields, or printed to a new PDF first.

Good to know

  • Documents are shown to signers in the page when they are PDFs. Uploaded documents must be PDFs of up to 30 MB.
  • A document can have up to 20 people.
  • Offer letters in Human Resources still use their own signing flow, which is unchanged.

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