Subscription process: defining signers

Adding the signers for each document — why the platform deliberately makes you do it by hand, and why the phone number is the field not to skip.

Overview

Before a document can go out, it needs its signers. You enter them by hand — and that is a deliberate design choice rather than a gap.

Why this is manual

The platform knows who the shareholder is. It could populate the signers automatically. It does not, because doing it by hand provides legal proof that the person setting up the process knows the person signing.

An electronic signature carries weight partly because a named person asserted who the signatory was. Auto-populating from a database would remove the human assertion that gives the signature its evidential value.

So when this step feels like unnecessary typing, it is not. It is the step that makes the signature stand up.

What you'll learn

The three kinds of signer you can add
Why the order you add them in decides where each one signs
Why the phone number matters more than it looks
How to correct a signer before anything is sent
What state to leave this stage in

Steps

From the project Dashboard, open the process under Active Operations. On the Subscription Dashboard, go to E-Signature Setup.
For a document, add a signer. The Add a New Signer dialog opens.
Choose the signer Type. A signer can be a Shareholder (search and select from the project's shareholders), a Project Member (select from your team), or an email-identified person (entered directly).
Provide the signer's details: first name, last name, email and phone.
Save. Repeat for every party who must sign that document.
Use Change Signer if you need to correct one afterwards.

The order you add them in is the order on the page

The order matters, and it is easy to miss because nothing on screen announces it.

A document's signature placeholders are filled by position. Where a template carries two signature blocks, the first signer in that document's list gets the Signer 1 placeholder and the second gets Signer 2 — so the order you add signers in decides who signs where on the page.

Two things follow:

Add them in the order the document expects, not the order you happen to think of them. On a transfer where the template puts the seller first, adding the buyer first puts each signature in the other's block.
Check the count matches. A template with two blocks and one signer leaves the second block unsigned; a template with one block and two signers gives the second signer nothing to sign. Neither raises an error at setup — a placeholder that finds no signer is skipped silently — so it surfaces at signing time or, worse, on the executed document.

This is per document, not per envelope. Grouping documents into one envelope (A8.8) and the order signers are invited in (A8.9) are separate questions.

The phone number is not optional in practice

The phone number is where the signature verification code is sent during signing. A wrong number means the signer cannot complete, and the failure appears at the worst possible moment — mid-signature, on their screen rather than yours.

Treat it as required whether or not the form insists.

What good looks like

Every document has all its required signers, each with a correct email and phone number. On a transfer, that usually means both sides: whoever signs for the seller, and the buyer.

Nothing has been sent. Signers are defined; envelopes come next (A8.8).

Common problems

A signer is not in the shareholder list. Use the email-identified option rather than forcing them into the shareholder list. An external adviser or a company officer signing on behalf of an entity is a signer without being a shareholder.

You are trying to add an entity as a signer. A legal entity signs through a person. Add the individual who holds the authority.

The name does not match their identity document. It should. A mismatch surfaces as a problem for the signer, not for you.

You want to reuse one signer record across several documents. Add them per document as the flow requires — the per-document assertion is the point of the manual step.

A signature landed in the wrong block. The signers were added in the wrong order for that document's template. Correct the order rather than the template, unless the template itself has the blocks the wrong way round (A2.5).

A8.6 — Subscription process: generating and reviewing documents · the documents being signed
A8.8 — Subscription process: building an envelope · grouping documents into one request
A8.9 — Subscription process: signing order and DocuSign options · controlling who signs when
A8.10 — Subscription process: tracking signatures and sending reminders · following it through