Here’s Why Your Team Needs E-signature Signing Groups

If you’re tired of bottlenecks holding up progress on your agreements, then put the power of Signing Groups to work. We use signing groups all the time – it’s a great way to boost collaboration and eliminate backlogs while remaining secure and in control of your agreements.

What is a signing group?

Signing Groups let you to send an envelope to a predefined group of recipients and have any one member of the group sign the documents. Anyone in the group, on behalf of everyone, can open and sign an agreement with their own signature.

How a signing group works

Let’s look at an example. In HR, an offer letter is being prepared for a candidate. The HR manager, recruiter, and onboarding manager are working together to win this candidate over.

As a team, they set up a signing group for the process of making an offer to a candidate, which means that any of them can respond if the candidate comes back with a signed document. If the HR manager is unavailable, the onboarding manager can countersign the offer. The candidate isn't kept waiting and the hiring process doesn't stall. There’s no need to wait for the HR manager to return to work.

Signing groups work just as well in other departments, too. Consider your legal team. If any of your in-house legal eagles can sign off on a contract for you, why not set up a signing group for those agreements that need a signature so you can speed up negotiations with vendors?

Setting up signing groups

When setting up a signing group, think about its purpose before you add people. Who has the authority to sign off on the types of agreements you have? Would employees from different teams benefit from being on a single signing group? For what purpose?

Once you’re clear on how it’s going to work and who should be included, set up your signing group through your DocuSign Admin. They’ve got the power to add, edit, or delete groups. The person sending an envelope can only include a signing group if it's been set up within their DocuSign Account.

You can also set up an email alias for the signing group. If you do, all communications are sent to that email address and not to individual group members. Group members can access the envelope from their DocuSign account or, if they have access to the group email, they can use that link in the email notification.

You stay in control

If someone in your signing group moves to a different area of the business or is no longer part of your organization, you can easily remove them from the signing group so they no longer receive notifications or updates about the status of the agreement.

Here are other settings that help you retain control in a signing group:

• Only one member can access the signing experience at a time. If they sign out before completing their activity, they can click ‘Finish Later’ to save what they’ve done. Everyone in the signing group will see their progress. (Note: signatures and initials are not preserved).  
• All signing group members receive notification when an envelope has been completed. The loop is closed and everyone can tick it off their to-do lists.  
• Easily track the history of an envelope so you can see which group members have taken action once an invitation has been sent.  

Signing groups help get agreements done faster. Contact us to show you how.

Contributed by Vidya Narayanan, Sr. Technical Program Manager - DocuSign@DocuSign

This article is part of our DocuSign@DocuSign series which explores the ways we use our own products and features to run the DocuSign business. We don't just take advantage of the benefits of eSignatures, CLM and more, we get insights into our customers’ experiences which helps keep improving our products.