Document visibility in Zoho Sign

Availability: Enterprise edition

Zoho Sign's document visibility feature allows senders to control which documents within an envelope are visible to each recipient. In scenarios involving multiple agreements with an envelope, this feature ensures that each recipient can only view and sign the specific documents they are assigned to, keeping all other contents of the envelope hidden.

In other words, document visibility acts as a digital gatekeeper, which allows you to:

Protect confidentiality - Ensure sensitive information is shown only to the intended signer.
Streamline agreement workflow - Manage complex document workflows easily by adding multiple agreements and signers in the same workflow, rather than managing several requests.

How to enable document visibility in Zoho Sign

This action can only be performed by administrators. If you're an administrator:

From your Zoho Sign dashboard, hover over Settings and click Account settings.
Find Document visibility under Sending options.
Select the desired option and click Save.

Document visibility options in Zoho Sign

Rule Mode	Behavior
Off	Every recipient can see all documents in the envelope.
Must sign to view, unless sender	Signers can only see documents where they have signature fields while the sender sees everything.
Must sign to view, unless a member of sender's organization	Similar to "Must sign to view, unless sender", but in this case, all the users present in the sender’s organization can see all documents. This can be enabled/disabled by the sender.
Sender can set "Must sign to view, unless sender"	Similar to "Must sign to view, unless sender", but the sender can decide if they want the "Must sign to view, unless sender" logic to be applied for that specific envelope.
Sender can set "Must sign to view, unless member of sender's organization"	Similar to "Must sign to view, unless a member of sender's organization", but the sender can decide if they want the "Must sign to view, unless a member of sender's organization" logic to be applied for that specific envelope.
Sender can control	Allows the sender to select visibility of each document in the envelope for each recipient manually, while sending envelope for signature.

The sender can always see all documents.
Document visibility is applied at field level - If you had a marked a document as "invisible" for a particular recipient, and you add signers fields to the same recipient, the document will be marked as visible for the recipient.
Documents without any signer fields will be accessible by all the recipients.
You can update the document's visibility even when the document is in the correction state.
Recipient level document history will be disabled.
Print and sign feature is currently not supported.
Document visibility settings aren't in our mobile applications.

How to use document visibility for an envelope

Click Send for signatures.
Upload the document, add the relevant recipient details and click Continue.
In the document viewer window, click the Actions dropdown and select Document visibility.
Review the document visibility grid.
If admin has set "Sender can control" as the document visibility option, the sender needs to manually enable document visibility and apply the relevant settings.
Click Save.
Once all the necessary fields are added for your recipients, click Send.

Consider a scenario where Zylker is an organization and whenever a new employee joins the organization, the HR manager bundles all onboarding documents such as an offer letter, tax form, policy agreement into a single envelope.

With document visibility, the HR manager can ensure that the employee only views and signs the documents assigned to them, while sensitive documents like the tax form are accessible only to the finance team, keeping all other documents completely restricted to the relevant recipients.

Visibility requirements

Document	Employee	HR manager	Finance team
Offer letter	✅ Visible	✅ Visible	❌ Hidden
Tax form	✅ Visible	❌ Hidden	✅ Visible
Internal policy documents	✅ Visible	✅ Visible	❌ Hidden

Without document visibility, all recipients would see all three documents. With it enabled, each recipient sees only what's relevant to them.

How to achieve the above mentioned use case with Zoho Sign

Ensure Must sign to view unless sender is selected.
Place relevant document fields for the recipients as mentioned in the below table.