eSignatures

Preparing a request, field by field and signer by signer

Step 1 collects the client, the PDF, the signers and the options. You can add up to ten signers in total, each a free-text name and email pair that does not have to exist in your client list, plus up to five CC recipients, who receive the completed document and Certificate of Completion by email but are never asked to sign. Once there is a second signer a Signing order choice appears: “In order” invites each signer only after the previous one completes, while “All at once” invites everybody immediately. An optional expiry date stops the link working and stops reminder emails going out after that date.

Step 2 is the builder, which opens full screen with your document on an A4-proportioned canvas. Five field types are available, Signature, Initials, Date Signed, Text Box and Checkbox, and you place each one by clicking the tool then dragging the resulting chip onto the exact spot on the page. Below the tools every signer is listed with their own colour: whoever is selected there owns the next field you place, each placed chip is edged in its owner’s colour, and a small S1 or S2 selector reassigns a chip afterwards. Signers only ever see their own fields, and their marks are stamped only into their own boxes, so signer two can never fill or overprint signer one’s.

Four places that tell you where a request stands

The three metrics cards count Awaiting Signature, Expiring Soon and Signed in the last 30 days. The four tabs filter the table to All, Awaiting, Signed and Drafts. The Status column carries a badge per request: Awaiting in blue (covering both the awaiting and sent states), Signed in green, Expiring Soon in red, and Draft, Expired, Declined or Voided. A declined request shows the signer’s reason beneath its badge, and a voided one shows whatever reason your firm gave.

The fourth place is the one that answers chase-or-wait. “Details & audit trail”, available from any request’s menu whatever its status, breaks the request down per recipient: Waiting (not yet their turn), Invited, Viewed, Signed, Declined with reason, Voided or Expired, each timestamped. Viewing is tracked from the moment a signer opens the document after verifying identity, so Invited against Viewed tells you whether they have not looked at it or looked and stalled. On a multi-signer request the “Signed by N of M” line also adds a “Next:” marker naming whoever the request is currently waiting on.

What your client goes through, and what proves it happened

The signer opens a page headed Accupe eSignatures and moves through up to four stages: entering their email to request a one-time six-digit code, entering that code (valid for 10 minutes, with a resend link if it did not arrive), reviewing the document and completing their own fields, and a confirmation screen. Each signer verifies with their own email and holds their own signing session, so two signers never interfere with each other even on an “All at once” request. In a sequential chain, the second signer onwards reviews the document as already signed by those before them, because that is what they are attesting to. Signature capture offers Draw, Type or Upload (PNG or JPEG up to 2 MB), and they also type their full legal name as an attestation.

Accupe hashes both the original and the signed PDF with SHA-256 the moment the signature is submitted, and records both hashes on the signature. The Certificate of Completion is independently timestamped by a third-party time-stamp authority (FreeTSA, using the RFC 3161 protocol), falling back to Accupe’s server clock if that authority is briefly unreachable, and the certificate always discloses which source attested the time. This is a standard or advanced electronic signature, suitable for everyday business agreements under UK eIDAS and the eSign Act. It is not a qualified electronic signature, which would require a certificate authority and a hardware security module.

Managing a request after it has gone out

The row menu carries Open Document, Download PDF, Save as template and Details & audit trail on every request, adds Sign in person, Copy Document Link, Resend Email and Void Request while a request is in flight, and offers Download certificate once it is signed. Sign in person opens the signing page in a new tab with identity verification already satisfied, so you can hand your screen straight to a client sitting with you, and it is recorded distinctly in the audit trail as an in-person session witnessed by the staff member who started it.

Beyond the manual Remind button, Accupe chases unsigned requests automatically up to three times on a roughly three-day cadence, and in a sequential chain the automatic reminders only ever go to the signer whose turn it actually is, so nobody is invited early. Saving a request as a template snapshots its document, its field layout and its signer roles for reuse, and Bulk send pushes that template to a list of recipients entered one per line as email address, comma, name, then reports how many sends succeeded and how many failed.

What people come here to do

• Build and send a signature request. Signers, CC recipients, signing order and expiry, then placing five field types per named signer.
• Check where a request has got to. Metrics cards, tabs, status badges and the per-recipient breakdown that tells you whether to chase.
• See what your client sees. The four signing stages, the one-time code, declining, and how the signature is secured afterwards.
• Remind, void, template or bulk send. Every row action, the automatic three-reminder cadence, in-person signing, and sending to a list at once.

Where to go next

• Client Portal. eSign History is a portal section you can hide per client, and a pending signature is the first thing Workspace Home flags.
• Reports & Invoicing. Download certificate re-issues the Certificate of Completion as a branded report and saves a copy into your Reports list.
• Documents & Vault. Where the source PDFs you send for signature are usually kept, with their own separate visibility rules.