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Sending things to be read, not signed
Terms, policies and certificates sent alongside a document, and how to see who opened them.
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Most things you send with a document are not meant to be signed. Your terms of business, your privacy notice, a certificate of insurance, a residents' guide: the recipient needs to read them, and nobody signs a privacy notice.
Those go alongside as supporting documents. They are sent with the same email, they appear on the same page your recipient opens, and each time one is opened we record it against the person who opened it.
An envelope is the document you sent for signature, together with everyone who has to act on it.
The difference from a document in the envelope
| In the envelope | Alongside | |
|---|---|---|
| Signed | Yes | No |
| Merged into the finished file | Yes | No |
| Can carry signature fields | Yes | No |
| What is recorded | Signed, declined | Opened, downloaded |
The practical version: put something in the envelope when you need a signature on it, and send it alongside when you need the person to have seen it. Adding a twenty-page policy to the envelope means your recipient scrolls through it to reach one field, and it means the finished document says they signed your privacy notice.
Adding them
You do this in the same place you write the covering note.
- On Review and send, find Email and open the composer.
- Under Other documents to include, press Add.
- Choose From your documents to send something you have already uploaded, or Link to your website to point at a page on your own site.
- Add a short line saying what it is, if the name alone is not obvious. That line appears under the title on the recipient's page.
- Press Add again for each one, then close the composer.
A summary line on the send screen tells you how many are going out, so you can see at a glance that supporting material is included before you commit.
Proposals work the same way. The composer is a tab inside Preview on the send screen, rather than a button of its own, because a proposal already has a preview and two things called preview on one screen helps nobody.
Mentioning one inside your message
You can point at a specific item from your covering note, so the sentence reads "our terms of business are attached below" and the name is a working link rather than a phrase.
Use the option offered beside each item once you have added it. The link is built when you press send, because until then there is no recipient and therefore no link to build.
Sending your own file, or linking to your site
Both work, and the difference is worth a moment.
From your documents serves the file to that named recipient, behind whatever check you set on the envelope. Because the request comes to us, we can tell you it was opened and when.
Link to your website sends them to your own server. That is often the right choice for a policy you update regularly, since the link always points at the current version. The trade is that the request never reaches us, so we cannot tell you whether anybody read it, and the panel described below says so rather than showing a count we would be inventing.
An address must begin with https://.
What your recipient sees
They get one email, with the button for the document to sign and the supporting items listed underneath. Each one opens the page they were already going to, with that item ready to read, so the pack stays behind whatever check you set: if you required an access code, the code is needed for the supporting material too.
Nothing there asks them to sign anything, and nothing they read is added to the finished document.
Seeing who has read what
Open the envelope and look for the Supporting documents panel. For each item you sent, it lists the people it went to and, against each, when they first opened it, how many times, and whether they downloaded it.
An item you linked to your own site shows Hosted elsewhere, not recorded instead of a count. That is the honest answer rather than a zero: we cannot see a request that never reached us, and "nobody opened it" and "we cannot tell" are different facts.
Mail security products follow every link in an email, and those visits are excluded, so a first open shown here is a person rather than a scanner.
The first time each person opens each item is written into the envelope's audit trail alongside everything else that happened, which is what makes it evidence rather than a note.
Sending the same set every time
If the same four things go out with every engagement, put them in a document pack once and attach the pack to your template. Everything above then happens on its own each time you use it. See Reusable document packs.