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Choosing who signs first
When to send to everyone at once, and when order matters.
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On step two of the envelope wizard, under How should recipients sign?, choose Parallel so everybody is asked at once, or Sequential so each person is asked only after the one before them has finished. Parallel is the default and is right for most documents.
An envelope is the document you sent for signature, together with everyone who has to act on it.
Parallel
Every signer is emailed the moment you send. They sign whenever they get to it, in any order, and the envelope completes when the last one is done.
This is what you want when the signatures are independent of each other: two directors signing the same terms, a landlord and a tenant, a client and their spouse. It is also the faster option by some margin, because nobody is waiting on anybody.
The wizard describes it on the card itself: All recipients sign at the same time.
Sequential
Only the first signer is emailed when you send. When they finish, the second is emailed automatically, and so on down the list. The card reads Recipients sign one after another.
Choose it when the order genuinely carries meaning:
- A document that has to be approved internally before it goes to the client.
- A signature that depends on a value someone else fills in first, such as a figure or a date.
- An agreement where one side signs and then countersigns, and you want the record to show that sequence.
Once you pick Sequential, each recipient card shows Order: 1, Order: 2 and so on. That is the order they will be asked in, top to bottom.
What a waiting recipient sees
Under sequential signing, someone whose turn has not come has not been emailed yet, so there is nothing for them to open. If they somehow reach the document early, they are told the envelope is not yet awaiting their signature.
Viewers and CC recipients are not part of the queue. Both are emailed a read-only link when the envelope goes out, and a CC is copied on the finished document as well.
Choosing between them
Ask one question: does it matter who signs first?
If the answer is no, use Parallel. It finishes sooner and it gives you fewer people to chase, because a delay at position one under sequential signing stops everybody behind it.
If the answer is yes, use Sequential and put the person most likely to act promptly first. The whole chain moves at the speed of its slowest link, and the first link sets the tone.
Changing your mind
Change it freely while the envelope is a draft. Go back to the Recipients step and pick the other option.
Once the envelope has been sent, the order is part of the record and is fixed. If you have sent a document in the wrong order, void it and send a fresh one. See Cancel an envelope someone has already opened.
Following a sequential envelope
Open the envelope from Envelopes. The strip along the top shows how many of your recipients have signed, with Sequential signing noted beside it, and the Recipients panel shows where each person has got to.
If it has stalled, the person to chase is the one whose turn it currently is, and Send Reminder goes to exactly the recipients who have not yet signed.