Tip of the fortnight 4 - Best practices for building your e-signature workflow using forms

Hello fellow form builders, 

It's another fortnight - ah, time flies, doesn't it! Recently, we rolled out our integration with Zoho Sign (read our announcement post here), and it can be incredibly useful in collecting secure e-signatures from your form respondents.

 

Getting your agreements, contracts, waivers, etc. legally bound through this e-signature workflow is easy, yet every use case needs a distinct workflow setup. That's why today, I want to share a few of the best practices you can follow to get your various deals signed hassle free!

Let's start by discussing the two types of signers your e-signature workflow can involve and the recipient setup that needs to configure for them. Assume a situation where the name and the email of one of the signers are known (say, the Landlord) whereas the other signer is your form respondent (say, the Tenant) whose name and email is not known until the form submission. For this, you need to configure the recipient details in both Zoho Sign and Zoho Forms. I'll break it down for you.

• In the Zoho Sign template setup, enter the role, action, name and the email address of the Landlord. Add only the role and the action for the form respondent in the same setup when you create the template.
  

• In the Zoho Forms integration setup, the landlord's details will be prefilled from the Zoho Sign's setup (Click the Recipient List to view this). Under the Recipient Details, choose the Tenant's Name and Email from the form fields and finish the remaining setup.
  

Get signatures automatically from verified respondents 

As discussed above, in the e-signature workflow using forms, the signer of the document can be a form respondent, a person of your organization, or even yourself. When you want to instantly send the document, and request a signature when the form submission is made, choose Send the document's link to recipients email inside the integration set up in your form, while also configuring the template and the field mappings. 

Now each recipient has to login into their email to access the link of the signing document before signing it. This way, each signing recipient is verified using their email address to ensure the authenticity of the recipient's signature. A preview of a completed Sales Agreement is shown below where the seller and buyer have signed the document agreeing to the stated norms.

Get signatures from certain form submitters

At times, when you wish to analyze the form submission and request e-signatures only when they meet a set of criteria, you can set up a manual workflow. So now, from the pile of form submissions you receive, you can analyze and manually select the desired entries and trigger the signing document to them. For this, choose None, I will send the document manually while setting up the integration. 

 

Collect signatures in the same device 

From a fitness service waiver to an event participation agreement, it's ideal to get signatures from your clients, employees or customers in-person, right after the form submission. To perform this, add only the role of the signer and mark it as Needs to Sign inside your Zoho Sign template. You don't need to fill out the email address or the name here.

Inside the form integration setup, pick out the email and the name from the form fields and choose Redirect to Zoho Sign document.

In the big picture, when the form is submitted, the document appears on the same device requesting for signature. On signing it, the respondent can click on the "message" icon to send themselves a copy of the signed document. (It is sent to the email address chosen under Recipients Details). Note that the in-person signing is intended for single signing recipient only. To have more than one signers, try adding a host to perform the in-person signing (read more on how to set up this in Zoho Sign template here).  

And, that's a wrap! You can get started with the Zoho Sign template creation here. Once you get the hang of it, read our help document to get started. For further queries, or to share your experience with us, comment below - we'd love to hear from you.  

Until next fortnight,

Prasana

• Topic Participants

• Prasana Lakshmi

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