Right now CRE individuals and teams are needing alternative solutions to patch the chasms that have been created from the rather abrupt work-from-home call to action. Some solutions may be turned into a long-term fit, others will be temporary.
For those faced with the problem of no longer being able to easily distribute documents and receive quick responses: if you’re in search of a sounding board for your ideas and queries, we can help, and have collated a few basic DocuSign FAQs as a starting point to answering your questions.
There are a variety of plans available. The first step is discussing your problems and immediate needs so that the right plan can be chosen. Open Box has a relationship with DocuSign and can guide you through the process.
If you’re only wanting a few people to upload individual documents and send them out for e-signature, all you need is an account, to add users to your account and some basic setup and training for your users if they’re not already familiar with the process. It can take less than a day to have a basic DocuSign eSignature plan setup.
If you’re needing a larger rollout that entails integration with DocuSign and multiple people across your organization involved at different stages of the process, then a few other steps are required. Your requirements will need to be confirmed and if there is no pre-existing integration with DocuSign available, integration points will need to be developed. Integration will depend on what you’re using to store the details you’d need populated in the document and the details of recipients. 3rd Party integration with DocuSign is typically tested on a non-production environment and needs to meet DocuSign requirements before it can be promoted to production.
Anyone wanting to be able to send documents to people for review and/or feedback and signing.
If you use DocuSign in a 3rd party solution, you will need your own, separate account in order to make use of DocuSign for documents that fall outside the scope of that solution.
If you have a DocuSign account, you do not need to sign the document you are sending. You can review the status of the document you sent, correct email addresses and see information on the status of your document (envelope) and signing.
No, people signing or even countersigning documents do not need to be users of DocuSign.
- AP / Treasury: PO approvals; supplier invoice approvals, vendor onboarding & offboarding forms
- HR: Proof of receipt of documents; employee / vendor onboarding & offboarding
- Legal: Contracts, statements of work
- Leasing
You can set the signing order before sending the document for signing. You can specify the signatories who are able to sign in parallel as well as the ones needing to sign in a series.
Absolutely. DocuSign has a number of field types that can be applied to existing documents. Drag and drop radio buttons for single-select options and checkboxes for multi-select options to name but a few. You are also able to add customized fields.
DocuSign’s Business Pro plan allows for the import of recipients and automatic, bulk sending of unique documents to each recipient. You can also create a template form and distribute it to people.
Integrating with DocuSign also allows one to send multiple documents automatically. You would lean more towards this option if you have another system that stores all your recipient details and want to seamlessly send documents to them for signing, instead of a manual import.
Within DocuSign, you can see the overall document (envelope) status as well as the status of all signatories. If you’re looking for summary metrics on all DocuSign documents, you may want to consider retrieving this information from DocuSign through integration for advanced reporting in another platform.
DocuSign does not have advanced out-the-box reporting or visualization functionality. It does however have many points of integration. Should visualizations be required on metrics for responses to queries and optional/required fields, response timing, signatories and overall document status, this information can be sourced from DocuSign and reported on in a separate platform.
Open Box specializes in integration, Microsoft Power BI and custom reporting and is also able to quickly take on new, client-preferred platforms.
As an Admin in DocuSign, you can do things like:
- Create your brand for your communications and signing experience
- Control whether all signatories should automatically receive executed documents
- Setup the timing of automatic reminder emails
- Configure document retention
- Setup email notification preferences for signers and senders
This depends on your skill and level of comfort with using DocuSign as a tool. You can perform the basics of creating and sending envelopes, you can manage templates as well as the setup and accounts within DocuSign and overtime can become very familiar with the process. If this is not something you can do right now, Open Box can help you set this up.
When it comes to automatically sending a lot of information to DocuSign and getting information out of DocuSign (e.g. to trigger processes in other systems or for reporting purposes), you should chat to a developer. If you don’t have one, chat to one of ours.
It can but it doesn’t have to, it depends on what you need. Through integration, details can be sent to DocuSign and tags in the document can be replaced automatically with data. You can also upload the documents with the tags replaced; or integration can upload this for you, where tags requiring input from people (e.g. signatures and initials) would remain and can be identified by DocuSign automatically.
This will depend on the system you’re using. Many products today have pre-existing DocuSign integration, or at least the ability to integrate with other applications using APIs. Even if there aren’t integration points and it’s a relatively locked-down system, in today’s world there are ways around this through initiatives like robotic process automation, which can retrieve data from screens (amongst other things). Chat to us to figure out whether DocuSign could work in your environment.
You can setup a DocuSign document retention policy however by default they’re stored under your DocuSign account. If documents need to be housed in a separate location, you can either download the documents manually from DocuSign or, through integration, these can be retrieved automatically from DocuSign and placed on your platform of choice (e.g. SharePoint, Box.com, another shared repository). Typically, the automatic retrieval from DocuSign and upload to another platform involves integration, which Open Box has completed in the past.
If you’re not a signatory and would like to receive the completed agreement, as the sender you can opt to have it automatically emailed to you. If you’re not the sender you can be added as a carbon copy recipient to receive confirmation.
DocuSign pricing varies based on your user and functional requirements. You can visit these pages for more pricing information:
DocuSign offers a free 30-day trial.
When signing up for DocuSign, you also receive access to a free demo account where you can setup and send demo documents with no limitations on functionality.
Open Box has a history of working with DocuSign products and is able to help you throughout your journey. Open Box has
- A well-rounded skillset, offering guidance for smaller projects, all the way through to larger implementations which can require bigger rollouts & training, integration (sending data to and retrieving data and documents out of DocuSign) and advanced reporting. Open Box has consulting, project management, development and quality assurance resources to manage the full project lifecycle.
- Experience working with DocuSign, from simple setup to the larger, more complex integrations. An example of recent work was implementing DocuSign as a sub-process in an approvals workflow which is responsible for triggering workflows in other systems. Open Box also built integration to upload executed documents to the preferred document storage platform as part of this process and provided reporting on the overall status of documents outside of DocuSign.
