Templates, fields, and the preparation workflow
Templates and documents
A template lives in your Library and can be reused as many times as you need. It holds the PDF, the fields, and the participant structure.
A document is created from a template when you send. It has active recipients, a signing workflow in progress, and its own lifecycle — completed, declined, expired. Changes to the template after sending do not affect documents already in progress.
This separation means you invest time preparing a template once, then send from it repeatedly without rebuilding it each time.
What template preparation does
Template preparation is the step between uploading a PDF and being able to send it. On the preparation page you place fields onto the PDF and assign each field to a participant.
Until a template has at least one signature field assigned to each signer, it cannot be sent. Templates with approvers only do not require a signature field.
Fields and participants
Every field on a template belongs to a participant. When you place a field you choose which participant it is assigned to — a specific signer, an approver, or the sender.
At send time, each participant slot is filled with a real person (name and email). The fields assigned to that participant become theirs to complete when they receive the document.
This means the same template can be sent to different people each time without any changes to the template itself.
Sender fields
Sender fields are a special category. Rather than being completed by a recipient, they are filled in by the sender at send time — before the document is dispatched.
They work like mail merge fields in Word: you define the field on the template, and each time you send you supply the value. This is particularly powerful with Bulk Send — a single contract template can go to hundreds of recipients, each copy personalised with a different name, price, or property address, all driven from a CSV without creating a new template for each one.
Sender field values are printed directly onto the PDF before it reaches the recipients.
The preparation workflow in practice
- Upload a PDF to the Library
- Open it to enter the Template Preparation page
- Place fields for each participant — signers, approvers, sender
- Configure field properties as needed (labels, ordering, validation)
- The template is ready to send
From that point, sending creates a new document each time. The template stays in the Library unchanged.