There are two send stories. Publishing a template is a one-time job for whoever owns it. Sending a document from a record is what everybody else does, and it takes about a minute.
Publishing a template
A short wizard, and each step settles something that would otherwise have to be decided every single send.
Surfaces. Which records this template can be sent from. Restrictive is right.
Signers. Which roles are involved and in what order. Whether they sign in parallel or one after another.
Validity. How long a signing link stays alive: a day, a week, a month, a custom period, or never expiring.
Review, and then publish, which flips the template from draft to active and makes it sendable.
Choosing a validity
A week suits most commercial documents. Long enough for somebody to get to it, short enough to create a reason to.
A day is for something genuinely time-boxed.
Never expiring is almost always wrong. A link that works indefinitely is a link that still works after the person has left the company, and it is the sort of thing that is only ever noticed afterwards.
Expiry is not a dead end. An expired document can be reissued.
Sending from a record
Open the deal, the person or the supplier, and send from there.
You see the templates published to that surface, pick one, name the signers, and send. The values come from the record, so there is nothing to fill in.
Naming signers is the only real decision. For each role in the template, either pick somebody from the record, which is the usual case and needs no typing, or enter a name and email directly.
Before it goes, the fields are resolved and anything that cannot be filled is flagged. Fix it or send anyway with your eyes open, but do not skim past it: an empty value on a contract is the failure this check exists for.
Before your first real send
Send one to yourself. All the way through, including signing it.
It takes five minutes and it catches the things nothing else does: a field that resolves to nothing on a real record, a signature block in an awkward place, a validity that is shorter than your customers' response time, an email that reads oddly.
Do it once per template, not once per organisation. Each template has its own ways of being wrong.
Signing order
Parallel sends to everybody at once. Fastest, and right when the signers are independent.
Sequential sends to the first, and to the next only once that one has signed. Right when order matters legally, or when an internal approver should sign before it reaches a customer.
Sequential is slower by design. Use it when the order carries meaning, not as a default.
Signing it yourself first
Where your own organisation is a signer, you can sign as part of sending rather than waiting for your own email.
Worth doing. A document that arrives already signed by you reads as ready, and one that arrives unsigned invites the recipient to wait and see whether you are serious.
Where the send panel appears
On the record, not in Documents.
That catches people out on their first send: they open Documents looking for a way to start one, and there isn't one, because a document without a record would have nothing to fill itself from.
Open the deal, the person, or the supplier. The templates published to that surface are there.
After it goes
Each signer receives an email with a link. No account, no download, no software.
The document moves to sent, then to viewed when somebody opens it, then to partially signed or signed. All of that is visible without asking anybody, which is covered in the piece on tracking.
Sending to somebody not on the record
The usual case is that signers come from the record, which needs no typing and no possibility of a wrong address.
Sometimes the right signer is not there: a finance director who has to countersign, a lawyer acting for the customer. Those can be entered directly.
Two habits when you do. Check the address twice, because there is no record to have validated it. And add them to the record afterwards if they are going to recur, so the next document does not need typing either.
Getting it right first time
Check the name and the email. A misaddressed contract is the most common failure and the most embarrassing.
Check the record before you send, not the document. The document is a view of the record. If something is wrong, fix the record and the document is right.
Say it is coming. A contract arriving unannounced from an unfamiliar address gets left. Thirty seconds in a message beats three days of silence.
Do not send on a Friday afternoon unless it is genuinely urgent. It will sit until Monday and you will have spent two days of your validity window on a weekend.
Reminders
Signers can be reminded without re-sending, which keeps the original link alive rather than issuing a competing one.
Worth knowing because the instinct is to send the document again, and two live links to the same agreement is exactly the confusion to avoid.
A reminder is also a decision point rather than a reflex. Check the state first: somebody who has not opened it needs a different message from somebody who has read it twice.
What the recipient receives
An email carrying the document title, who it is from, and a link. Nothing to install and no attachment.
Worth knowing because customers occasionally ask whether it is genuine, and the answer is easier if you know what you sent them. Telling somebody in advance that it is coming, and from where, prevents almost all of that.
If something is wrong after sending
A document can be cancelled, which invalidates the links.
Do that rather than sending a corrected second copy and hoping the recipient signs the right one. Two live versions of an agreement is a genuinely bad situation, and cancelling first costs one extra click.
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