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Cancel an envelope someone has already opened
How to withdraw a document that is out with recipients, and what they see.
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Cancelling is called voiding in CecurSign, and it is the action you want. Open the envelope (the document you sent out for signature, together with the people asked to sign it), open the ... menu beside Send Reminder, and choose Void envelope. Give a reason, confirm with Void Envelope, and every signing link on it stops working at once.
How to do it
- Open Envelopes and open the envelope you want to withdraw.
- Open the ... menu in the top right, beside Send Reminder.
- Choose Void envelope.
- Fill in Reason for voiding. It is required.
- Press Void Envelope.
The reason is not a formality. It is emailed to the recipients and written into the envelope's audit trail, so anyone reading the record later can see why the document was withdrawn and by whom. Write the sentence you would be happy for a client to read, because they will read it.
What your recipients see
Everyone who was on the envelope receives an email with the subject Voided: followed by the envelope's subject, carrying the reason you gave.
If somebody opens their old link afterwards, the document does not open. They are shown a short message telling them the link is no longer valid and to ask you for a new one. There is no way for them to reach the file or the fields through that link again, which is the point of voiding rather than simply asking people to ignore it.
If some people had already signed
You can void an envelope that has been sent, one that has been opened, and one that is part signed. Signatures already given stay in the record: they were real acts and the audit trail keeps them, along with who signed, when, and the moment you voided.
What does not happen is completion. No finished document is produced, no certificate of completion is issued, and nobody else can add a signature. The envelope moves to the status Voided and stays in your list as the record of an agreement that was withdrawn rather than concluded.
Voiding cannot be undone. If you want the same document signed after all, send it again as a new envelope.
Once everyone has signed, it is finished
A completed envelope cannot be voided, deliberately. Everyone has signed, the document and its evidence are fixed, and unwinding that after the fact would make the record worth less to every party to it, including you.
If something in a finished document is wrong, the answer is a fresh agreement rather than an erasure of the old one. See I sent it with a mistake in it, which covers sending the same document back to the same people with their previous answers already filled in.
Voiding and deleting are different
A draft that was never sent can simply be removed: open it and choose Delete draft from the ... menu. Nobody has seen it, so there is nothing to keep.
Anything that has been sent is voided rather than deleted. The fact that a document went out to a named person, on a date, is part of the evidence, and it stays. See The audit trail.