Is it possible to sign a document as part of sending in DocuSign?

Question

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DocuSign Can the documents be signed automatically

Programmatically signing a document

At my company, some of the documents that get sent out for signature require the sender's signature as well as the customer's signature. The default DocuSign flow for this situation seems to be that the sender adds themselves as a recipient in Send view, then sends the document and immediately opens it in Recipient view, where they add their signatures.

Senders would prefer not have to re-open the document in Recipient view. It would make our process much more efficient if either:

1. the sender could add their signature as part of the sending process (e.g. a custom tag that is an image of their signature) or

2. we could use the DocuSign Rest API to sign on behalf of our employees

I haven't found a way to implement either approach. Option #1 doesn't seem possible because all of the custom tags prompt for user input or display information about the user.

Does anyone know of a way to do either of these options?

Answer 1

Unfortunately this is not possible, you'll always need to re-open the envelope after sending. The sending process and the signing process need to be separate; if they were not then you could take a long time tagging and setting up your envelope before you send (let's say you're editing the envelope, switching between other apps, responding to emails, etc.) and that you finally send the configured envelope after an hour.

How would the system know exactly when you signed so that it can record that in the audit trail? What if you want additional authentication for the recipients, beyond just the email and password you used to login to your DocuSign account, such as a phone access code or Knowledge Based Authentication?

That's why they are separate processes. In addition to that, you can not automate the signing for yourself or anyone else - that's the one part the human needs to do, so unfortunately you're stuck with one extra click of having to re-open the envelope.