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When a client accepts or declines
What happens on acceptance, the signature it produces, and what to do next.
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Accepting a proposal is a signing ceremony, not a tick box. Your client presses Accept & Sign, confirms who is accepting, and is taken straight into signing the engagement letter. What comes out the other end is a signed PDF, a certificate of completion and an audit trail, the same evidence any other document you send produces.
What the client does
Accept & Sign asks for two things: Full name and Email. Both are pre-filled from the person the proposal was addressed to and both stay editable, because the person who signs is often not the person it was emailed to. Whoever is named here is the signer in the record, the name on the certificate, and the address the signed copy goes to.
They then land on the signing page with their name already filled in on the letter, which they can still change before signing. The signature itself is drawn, typed or picked from a saved one, as usual. The heading on that page tells them which proposal they are accepting, from which company and who sent it, and the document under it is titled with the letter's own title, so it reads as a continuation of the page they were just on rather than a new document from somewhere else.
If they get part of the way and stop, the link they already have picks up where they left off: their page offers Continue signing rather than starting again. Nothing new is created and no second email is sent.
What you get back
Once the signature is complete the proposal reads Accepted, and View signed document in the header opens the proposal's Document tab. Everything is there: the letter as it was signed, the certificate of completion, the evidence pack, who signed and when, and the full audit trail. You do not have to go looking anywhere else. See The signing record on a proposal.
The signing side of an acceptance runs on an envelope, which is CecurSign's word for a document sent for signature together with everyone who has to act on it. It is kept out of your Envelopes list, because the deal is the proposal and one row per deal is enough. If you want to see it in the list anyway, set the source filter there to Signed via a proposal.
An envelope created this way does not count against your envelope allowance. The commitment was already counted when you sent the proposal, and a client accepting an engagement letter should never be turned away over a limit they cannot see.
When the engagement starts
If you set a contract start and term on the proposal before sending, they are resolved at this point: an engagement set to begin on acceptance begins now, and a fixed term gets its end date from here. A fixed term is what a renewal reminder is driven from later. An ongoing engagement has no end date and so never appears in one.
Declining
Decline opens one box, Let them know why (optional), and a Confirm decline button. The reason really is optional: a decline you hear about beats silence, and requiring an explanation mostly persuades people to close the tab instead.
The reason, if they gave one, is on the proposal, which reads Declined. Where your company email address is set on Settings › Company details, a note goes there too, so put one in if you want a decline to reach an inbox rather than waiting to be noticed.
A client who has started signing can still decline. Once a proposal has expired, neither accepting nor declining is open to them, and the page tells them so.
Reading the letter afterwards
An accepted, declined or expired proposal still opens on its own link. Your client can re-read what they were quoted, what they signed, or what they turned down. Only the ability to act on it goes away.
Withdrawing a proposal is different: once you withdraw it, the link stops working, so the fee schedule cannot still be read or quoted back at you afterwards. See Withdrawing a proposal.
If they say the wrong person signed
The name and email captured at acceptance are the ones on the record, so the fix is a fresh proposal to the right person rather than an edit. Nothing about a signed engagement letter can be changed after the fact, which is the property that makes it worth anything.