Two features for the cases a single document does not cover. They are frequently confused and they solve opposite problems.
An envelope is several documents going to one party. A contract, an NDA and a schedule, signed together.
A bulk send is one document going to many people. The same policy acknowledgement to every employee.
Why they are separate features
They look similar from a distance and they fail differently, which is the real reason.
An envelope's risk is coordination: several documents, one relationship, and a signer who must not be asked to introduce themselves three times.
A bulk send's risk is scale: hundreds of rows, one bad column mapping, and a mistake that reaches everybody before anybody notices.
Those need different safeguards, which is why one is built from a record and the other from a spreadsheet with a mapping step and a recall.
Envelopes
They belong to a record
An envelope is anchored to a deal, a person or a supplier. It is created from that record rather than from the Envelopes tab, which is a read-only inventory of what exists.
That is not an arbitrary restriction. An envelope's whole purpose is to bind several agreements to one relationship, and one floating in isolation would have nothing to bind to.
If you open the Envelopes tab looking for a create button, this is why there isn't one, and the empty state says so.
Building one
Pick the documents, from the templates available on that record, and drag them into the order you want.
Choose parallel or sequential for the envelope as a whole.
Name the signers once. This is the point of an envelope: a person who appears in three of the documents is named a single time and signs each in their turn without being re-introduced.
Set the terms for all of it together: title, validity, and any additional identity checks.
Nothing exists until you send
The individual documents are not created when you build the envelope. They come into being when it is sent.
That keeps drafts out of your document list, which matters once several people are preparing envelopes: a list full of half-built children nobody can interpret is worse than no list.
When to use one
When the documents are genuinely one agreement split across several papers. A contract and its schedules.
Not for two unrelated documents that happen to be going to the same person on the same day. Send those separately; the recipient will thank you, and cancelling one will not disturb the other.
Bulk sends
Four steps
Pick the template.
Upload a spreadsheet of recipients.
Map the columns to the template's fields. Names and email addresses are matched automatically; anything else you point at the right column.
Name the batch and launch it.
Why a spreadsheet and a wizard
This is deliberately not a "format your CSV correctly" feature.
The person holding the list of two hundred employees is usually an operations or HR colleague who has never seen the template's internals and should not have to. The mapping step exists so they can point at columns in their own file rather than renaming headers to match something they cannot see.
Before you map columns
The mapping step is where batches go wrong, because a column pointed at the wrong field is invisible until documents arrive.
Open the spreadsheet first. Know what is in each column and whether the headers mean what they say.
Check the email column specifically. It is the one failure that reaches the wrong person rather than merely looking odd.
Look at the last row, not the first. Spreadsheets are tidy at the top and messy at the bottom, where somebody added three entries by hand.
Watching a batch
Each batch shows a state, a progress bar and a recipient count. Opening one shows every document individually and which ones failed.
Failures are normal at volume. A bad address in a list of three hundred is a data problem, not a system problem, and the batch tells you which row.
There is a recall for a batch with unfinished documents, which is the safety net for launching with the wrong template or the wrong list.
Before a big one
Send to yourself first. One row, your own address. Two minutes, and it catches a wrong field mapping before three hundred people see it.
Check the list for duplicates. Two copies of the same agreement to one person is confusing and looks careless.
Watch the validity. Three hundred people will not all sign within a day, and a batch that expires halfway through has to be reissued to exactly the people who did not respond.
Tell them first. A mass agreement arriving without warning gets treated as phishing, correctly, by the more careful half of your organisation.
What neither one does
Neither collects payment. A signed agreement is not an invoice; billing follows in Finance.
Neither negotiates. A recipient who wants a clause changed cannot edit the document, which is correct. Cancel, amend, reissue.
Neither chases on its own. Reminders are deliberate. Nothing sends escalating emails to your customers without somebody deciding to.
Scale, realistically
A bulk send of a few hundred is routine. Beyond that, two things change.
Delivery becomes visible. At volume, a small proportion of addresses will always bounce, and that is a list-quality signal worth acting on rather than an error.
Timing matters more. Several hundred documents arriving at nine on a Monday compete with everything else in the inbox. Mid-morning midweek does measurably better.
Recalling and cancelling
Both features have a way back, and they behave differently.
An envelope can be cancelled, which stops the whole set. Individual documents inside it are not cancelled separately, because the envelope is the unit.
A batch can be recalled while documents in it are unfinished. Anything already signed stays signed; a signature cannot be withdrawn by the sender, which is the correct behaviour and worth knowing before you launch to three hundred people.
Choosing between them
The test is what the recipient experiences.
One person, several documents to sign in one sitting? Envelope.
Many people, one document each? Bulk send.
Many people, several documents each? That is a bulk send per document, and it is worth asking whether all of them are genuinely necessary.
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