Foldr Sign sends a document for signature straight from the share it’s on. You place the fields, name the people who need to sign, and they sign from a link in their email (no account needed, unless they’re a colleague, in which case they sign in as usual). When everyone has signed, the signed copy is saved next to the original with a certificate of completion as its last page.
This article describes Foldr 11.1. You’ll need Send for signature on the share the document is on; if Sign won’t let you pick your file, that’s usually why, and Setting up Sign is the page to point your administrator at.
Sending an envelope
In the web app, go to Shared by me, open the Envelopes tab and choose New envelope. The wizard has four steps.
1. Choose file
Pick the document. It has to be a PDF: Sign doesn’t convert Word documents for you, so save or export the document as PDF first and pick that. One document per envelope.
2. Compose
Give the envelope a Name (it starts as the file’s name), and optionally an Email subject and a Message for the signers, which appears in their invitation.
Reminders re-emails anyone who hasn’t signed yet every so many days, up to three times. It’s off unless you put a number in.
Expires is when the signing links stop working. Leave it and the envelope has 90 days; pick a date to change that, up to a year away.
Then add your Recipients. Search for colleagues or groups, or paste in an email address for somebody outside your organisation.
Everyone signing one copy, or a copy each?
As soon as there’s more than one recipient, you choose between:
- Everyone signs the same document. One envelope that several people sign, such as a contract between you and two directors of the other company.
- Send a copy to each recipient. Each person gets their own envelope, their own link and their own signed PDF, such as a policy every member of staff has to acknowledge. This is a batch: it shows as a single row in your list with a count of how many have signed, and you get one email when the last of them has.
Groups only make sense with a copy each, so adding a group switches to that option for you. The group is expanded into its members when you press send, and anyone in it without an email address is skipped (you’ll be told who).
Who goes first?
When everyone signs the same copy, Signing order decides whether they’re all invited at once (Everyone at once) or in turn (One after another), where each person is only emailed once the person before them has signed. Drag the recipients into the order you want. One after another is the natural choice when a manager should sign only after the employee has.
3. Place fields
The document opens with a palette of Field types: Signature, Initials, Date, Text, Checkbox, Name and Email. Click a type, then drag on the page to draw the field, or just click to drop one at its usual size. Fields can be dragged about and resized from a corner, and clicking one lets you tick or untick Required or Delete it.
When several people are signing one copy, Place for shows each of them in their own colour; whoever is selected there owns the next field you place, so give each person their own boxes.
Every signer needs at least one required signature or initials field. If you forget somebody entirely, Sign adds a signature box for them at the bottom right of the first page rather than send them a document with nothing to sign, which is kind of it, but you’ll usually want to put it somewhere better yourself.
4. Review and send
Check the recipients and press Send now. Each signer gets their own link by email, and the envelope moves to your list as out for signature.
What the people signing see
The invitation email has a Review and sign button. Colleagues are asked to sign in to Foldr first (a forwarded link is no use to anybody else), and people outside your organisation go straight in.
Before anything else, they’re asked to agree that their electronic signature counts as their handwritten one, and the time of that agreement is recorded. Then the document opens with their fields highlighted and a button that walks them from one to the next.
- Signature and Initials open a box where they type their name and pick a handwriting style, or draw with a mouse or finger. The first signature they make is reused for the rest of the document, so a twelve-page contract doesn’t mean twelve signatures.
- Date fills in today’s date with a click.
- Name, Email and Text are typed; Checkbox is ticked.
When the required fields are done, Submit signed envelope finishes. Anybody who’d rather not sign can choose Decline to sign and give a reason; that ends the envelope for everyone, and you’re emailed with their reason.
Once the last person has signed, each signer can download the signed copy from the same page and is emailed a link to it.
After it’s signed
The signed copy is saved in the same folder as the original, named after it with -signed- and a short reference on the end, so the original is never overwritten. Its last page is the Certificate of Completion: each signer, how they were identified, the IP address and browser they used, when they viewed, agreed and signed, and the envelope’s full audit trail.
If your administrator has linked custom fields to Sign on that share, the signed copy arrives with them filled in (who signed, when, and so on), and it’s indexed for search like any other file. It also raises an Envelope Completed event that MaSH automations can pick up, to file it somewhere else, say, or tell another system. See Events and triggers.
Keeping track
Shared by me > Envelopes lists what you’ve sent, filtered by All, Drafts, Out, Completed and Cancelled. Opening an envelope shows each recipient and where they’ve got to (awaiting signature, opened but not yet signed, signed or declined), a Remind button beside anyone who’s still pending, and the audit trail so far.
Shared with me > Envelopes is the other side: anything waiting for your own signature, under Awaiting me, with a badge in the sidebar until it’s done.
To stop an envelope that’s out, open it and choose Cancel envelope; everyone who was invited is told by email. Envelopes can’t be changed once they’ve been sent, so if a recipient or a field is wrong, cancel it and send a corrected one.
Templates
If you send the same document over and over (the same contract, the same consent form), open an envelope you’ve already sent and choose Save as template. The template keeps the document, where every field sits, the subject, message, signing order and expiry, and one role for each signer.
To use one, go to Shared by me > Envelopes > Templates and choose Use. You skip straight past choosing the file and placing fields, and just add the right number of people in the right order. Templates are your own, rather than shared with colleagues, and Flow bundles can copy them to another Foldr.
Templates also power Send for signature on a form, which sends each response out for signing automatically. See Building and publishing a form.
Things worth knowing before you rely on it
Leave the document alone while it’s out. Signers see the file as it is when they open it, and the signed copy is made from the file as it is when the last person signs. If the document needs changing, cancel the envelope, change the document and send it again, so that everybody signs the same words. Renaming or moving the file within its share is fine, and the envelope follows it; moving it to another share or deleting it cancels the envelope.
Stick to Western European text in typed fields. The text people type into fields is stamped onto the PDF in a font that covers English and the Western European languages. Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese and other scripts don’t survive the trip, so for now, documents that need those typed into them aren’t a good fit.
Drafts can’t be picked up again. If you leave the wizard part-way through, the draft appears under Drafts but can only be deleted, not reopened, so it’s quicker to start the envelope again.
Expiry is quiet. When an envelope reaches its expiry date the links stop working and it moves to Expired, but nobody is emailed about it, so keep an eye on anything with a deadline.
Treat signing links like the documents they open. The link in each invitation is that signer’s key to the document, and after signing, to the signed copy.