Sending a document

This page is for the sender: everything between opening the record and clicking Send. It assumes an admin has already completed the one-time org setup.

Start the request

From the Sign Requests card on the record, choose New signature request. The composer offers two clearly separate things:

• A document picker listing every PDF already on the record, whatever produced it: a document Sliick Docs generated, a counterparty’s contract someone attached, or a PDF you upload now.
• A template tab, which generates a fresh document from a template against this record. That generation is real and is saved to the record like any other, and the document it produces is then the one you place fields on and send.

A password-protected or dynamic form PDF is refused as soon as you pick it, with advice to remove the password or flatten the form. Documents generated from a Sliick Docs template can never be either shape. A scanned PDF is fine: its pages render for you while you place fields, and again for the signer.

Before you can send, two org-level settings have to be in place: the signing page address your signers will open, and an org-wide email address the verification code can be sent from. If either is missing, the composer says so in a banner naming the setting and where to fill it in, and refuses the send rather than issuing an invitation nobody can act on. Drafts stay creatable and editable in the meantime.

Fields that place themselves

A document generated from a template that has e-signature configured carries its own field placement. Pick it in the composer and the signature fields are already positioned and the signer roles already filled in, with no extra click and no re-rendering: the document you picked is, byte for byte, the document that gets signed.

A document with no placement information opens for manual placement, quietly and exactly as you would expect, so sending a counterparty’s contract stays a first-class path. If the document you picked was generated before a change to its template’s signature setup, the composer says so plainly rather than placing a partial set of fields, and you can place the rest yourself.

A document produced outside Salesforce can carry its own placement instructions as text. See Signature tags.

Choose the signers

Each row on the roster offers the people the record already knows: the record itself when it is a person, whoever it looks up to, its owner, and the contacts hanging off it. Pick one, or type in anybody else. A counterparty who is not in your CRM at all is a perfectly normal signer.

Picking someone rather than typing them does two useful things: it removes the chance of a mistyped address, which fails silently, and it links the completed request back to that contact so signing history becomes reportable.

Signing order. With two or more signers you get a Sign in order toggle. On, only the next signer is emailed, and each one is invited automatically as the previous completes. Off, everyone is invited at once.

In-person signing. Tick Signs in person on a signer and they skip the emailed verification code entirely: you are attesting to their identity, and that waiver is recorded in the audit trail. They receive no invitation email. Instead, after you send, start their hosted signing session from the confirmation panel or from the Sign Requests card. A fresh one-time link opens in a new tab for you to hand the device over. Starting a session is itself recorded, carrying your identity as the host.

Place the fields

Drag field types onto the document and assign each one to a specific signer, colour-coded. The available types are signature, initials, date signed (stamped automatically), date picked by the signer, text, amount, checkbox and dropdown. Any field can be marked required. Placement boxes carry a light halo and a solid label chip, so they stay readable over a dark or heavily inked page as well as a white one.

Every field belongs to a signer, always. The first field you place creates the signer role it belongs to, so a field can never end up owned by nobody. Removing a role, or turning it into a CC recipient who receives a copy rather than signing, takes that role’s fields with it after asking you first. Remove the last signer and you are left with a fresh empty one rather than fields with no owner.

For a dropdown, select the placed field and enter one choice per line. The signer must pick one of your values, and anything else is rejected. A dropdown with no choices cannot be completed, and warns you.

If you place no fields at all, each signer simply gets one signature field at the end of the document.

Fields belong to the signer, not to their row. Reordering the roster moves people around without ever handing one person’s fields to another. Removing a signer takes their fields with them, which is the right behaviour and also a destructive one, so you are asked to confirm first, told who you are removing and how many of their fields go with them.

You can open the email preview and come back without losing placements: the composer keeps your placed fields as you left them.

Add a message

The composer has an optional email panel: a subject prefilled from your invite template that you can override for this one request, and a personal message to the signers. Both are saved with a draft and restored when you reopen it.

Replies reach you

Every e-signature email a recipient gets, meaning the invitation, the reminder, the verification code, the cancellation and the completion package, carries a reply-to address pointing at the person who sent the envelope. A signer with a question replies and reaches a human, rather than replying into an unattended mailbox that discards it. There is nothing to configure and it works in every org.

Worth knowing if your org sends from a shared identity on purpose. The From line is your org-wide address, so an organisation that verified something like contracts@acme.com specifically to keep individuals out of view sees only that address there. The reply-to is the other half of the picture: it carries the sender’s own email address, so every recipient of an invitation, reminder, cancellation or verification-code email can see who sent it.

If your team sends from a shared login, the reply-to is whoever clicked Send, which may be a seat several people share or an admin sending on somebody else’s behalf. If nobody reads that mailbox, a signer sees what looks like a route to a person and gets silence, which is worse than an address that announces itself as unattended. Send from a monitored account, or set the envelope’s Sender field before sending.

The two notices that go only to the sender, finalising and retrying sealing, carry no reply-to, because the sender is already the recipient.

Large documents

Two ceilings apply, depending on how your org signs.

Your org	Largest document	Page limit
Tier 0, the free default	2.8 MB	none
A sealed tier, with the render service connected	25 MB	150 pages

They differ because the work happens in different places. On the free path the signer’s own browser holds the whole document and composites their signature onto it locally, so the ceiling is what one browser round trip can carry. On a sealed tier the signer is shown server-rendered pages one at a time and the signed copy is assembled off-platform, so size stops being the binding constraint and page count becomes one instead. See Settings.

The composer tells you which limit applies to your org rather than letting you find out at send. The limit is checked when you pick the document and again at send, so if your plan lapses between drafting an envelope and sending it, a large document drafted under the higher ceiling is refused at send against the free number. That is better than inviting signers to a document their browsers cannot open.

Placing fields on a document over about 4 MB works slightly differently: the composer lays your fields over server-rendered pages, at true page size, rather than over the file itself. Those pages are prepared against a saved draft, so add your signers, save the draft, and reopen it. Preparation takes a few seconds for a short document and up to about a minute at the page limit. Abandoned drafts have their prepared pages cleaned up automatically.