How to speed up your electronic signature workflow

An electronic signature workflow is everything between "this contract is final" and "everyone has signed": preparing the file, placing the fields, choosing who signs and in what order, sending, chasing and filing the result. You'll also see it called a digital signature workflow or just a signature workflow. The steps are the same.

The electronic signature process itself takes a minute or two per person. The waiting around it is what takes days.

That's why speeding up a signing round rarely means switching to a faster tool. It means removing the pauses: the version nobody approved, the signer who wasn't told what's expected, the reminder that never went out, the third signer who can't start until the second one finishes.

Each pause gets a fix here, in the order they show up in a real round. The concrete examples come from Chaindoc's signing flow, and where other tools, DocuSign and Adobe among them, do something Chaindoc doesn't, we say so.

Look at any round that took a week and you'll usually find it sat idle somewhere, not in the signing itself. These are the usual spots:

1. 1.
   The document wasn't final. Someone spots a wrong date or a missing clause after it went out, and the round starts again.
2. 2.
   The signer didn't know what was expected. A bare "please sign" email with a 14-page PDF gets parked for later. Later is often never.
3. 3.
   Nobody owned the follow-up. The sender assumed the tool would chase, the tool was never told to, and nobody opened the pending list.
4. 4.
   Signers waited on each other. A strict one-after-another order means the fourth person can't start until the third has finished, even when the order doesn't matter.
5. 5.
   Volume. Sending the same agreement to forty people one at a time eats an afternoon and invites copy-paste mistakes.

Only the last one is really about tooling. The first four are habits, and habits are cheaper to fix than software.

The cheapest minute in the whole contract signing process is the one you spend before pressing send. Read the document once more as the signer will: names spelled the way they appear on their ID, the right legal entity rather than the trading name, amounts that match the quote, a start date that hasn't already passed.

Then settle the internal questions. If your finance lead still has an opinion about the payment terms, the signing round isn't the place to find out. A signer who watches a document change stops trusting the process, and you lose a day to an email thread about which version counts.

Format matters less than people think. PDF keeps the layout fixed on every screen; Chaindoc also takes DOCX, PNG and JPG, and converts Word files to PDF on upload, so the signer sees exactly what you checked. If you haven't sent a request before, there's a separate walk-through of how a signature request goes out, step by step.

Fair warning, though: none of this helps if the deal itself isn't agreed. An e-signature request is a poor negotiating tool. Send it when the conversation is over, not to end it.

If you send the same kind of document more than twice a month, a template will save you more time than anything else in this guide. You stop rebuilding the file and re-placing the fields, and you stop introducing fresh mistakes on every copy.

What belongs in a signing template

• The fixed text, reviewed once by whoever reviews your contracts.
• Placeholders for what changes from deal to deal: party names, dates, amounts, scope.
• Signature, date and initial fields, already placed for each signer role.
• A default message and deadline, so the request goes out the same way each time.

Chaindoc's contract template library covers NDAs, employment, vendor, service, lease and web development agreements, with an editor for changing the specifics, and it's included on the free plan. The bigger vendors work the same way. DocuSign templates are listed on all four of its eSignature plans, with shared team templates from Standard upwards, according to its plans page as we verified it on 21 September 2026.

Where templates go wrong is drift. Someone edits a copy instead of the master, and six months later four versions of your NDA are in circulation. Give each template one owner and date every change.

A request without a date is a request people get to eventually. Give every one a deadline, and put it in the message as well as in the tool, because a signer reads your words long before they notice a setting. "By Thursday at 5 pm" gets a response; "this week" gets a shrug.

Check the defaults too, because they're often looser than you'd guess. DocuSign's own developer blog notes that an envelope sent through its API without notification settings expires after 120 days and sends no reminders. Four months is a long time for a sales contract to sit unsigned. If your requests go out through an integration rather than the web app, look at what it actually sends.

Reminder settings that keep an electronic signature workflow moving

• First reminder after one or two working days, not the next morning. People need a chance to read.
• A second reminder two days before the deadline, with the date repeated.
• After that, a personal message from you, by email or phone. A third automated nudge mostly teaches people to ignore automated nudges.
• In a one-after-another order, remind only the person holding things up. Everyone behind them is waiting, not late.

This is the part of signature workflow automation that pays off fastest, and it's also the part most often left on whatever the default was.

In Chaindoc, the deadline is set on the request when you send it, and the pending list shows what's waiting, completed or overdue. From there you send a reminder, change a recipient who has left the company, or cancel a request that's no longer needed.

Honestly, the deadline matters more than the reminder schedule. A clear date plus one well-timed nudge beats a daily drip. And a reminder that comes from a person with a reason ("we start onboarding on Monday") gets answered faster than any template.

There are two ways to route a document to several people. In parallel, everyone gets it at the same time and signs whenever they're ready. In sequence, each person gets it only after the previous one has finished.

Parallel is faster almost every time, because nobody waits. A sequence earns its place when the order carries meaning, say a manager approving before the client sees the document. If the order doesn't matter, don't impose one: every link in a chain adds the slowest person's delay to everyone behind them.

Chaindoc sends a normal request to everyone at once. A set order, where each person receives the document only after the previous one acts, comes with approval routes on the Business plan. It's useful when a team needs roles and approvers in place before anything reaches a client.

Other tools call the same setting routing order or signing order. Whatever the name, it's the setting that turns a two-day round into a two-week one when it's switched on without a reason.

Bulk send is the one part of an electronic signature workflow where the tool, not your habits, decides the speed. It's for the same document going to many people who each sign their own copy, like a policy update for 200 staff or a consent form for every client. That's different from one request with several signers, where everyone signs the same copy.

DocuSign bulk send pulls recipient data from a CSV file and sends standard documents to all recipients at once, as DocuSign's guide to bulk send describes it. Its plans page lists the feature on Business Pro and Enhanced. Adobe lists bulk send on Acrobat Pro for teams.

Here DocuSign and Adobe are ahead: Chaindoc has no bulk send and no CSV import. A request takes up to 10 recipients, so for a few dozen people a template plus individual requests works, but it's manual work. If you regularly send one form to hundreds of people, pick a tool with bulk send for that job.

Plan for the phone. A signing request arrives as an email, and plenty of people read email on their phone first. If the document needs a laptop to sign, it waits until they're at one.

Signers in Chaindoc sign in the browser on whatever device they have, with nothing to install, so signing in a phone browser works the same way as on a desktop. What you control is the document: fewer fields and signature boxes big enough to tap. And never an instruction like "print page 4 and scan it back".

You can't tell whether changes to your electronic signature workflow work without a number. The simplest one is send-to-complete time: hours from the moment a request goes out to the moment the last signature lands. Track the median rather than the average, because one contract stuck in legal review for a month drags an average around and tells you nothing about the usual round.

Contract cycle time is the wider measure, from the first request for a contract to the signed copy. World Commerce & Contracting found the best organizations run that cycle almost four times faster than the worst, and its 2025 research puts the average loss from weak contract management at almost 9% of value. Signing is only the last leg of that cycle, but it's the leg that's easiest to measure and to optimize.

The timestamps already exist: each signed document comes with a record of who signed and when, and the guide to what the audit trail records explains it. Pull the numbers for your last twenty rounds, find the slowest five, and match each to one of the stalls above. That's your to-do list.

A faster electronic signature workflow doesn't weaken the signature. In the US, 15 U.S.C. § 7001 says a contract can't be denied effect just because it's electronic, and UETA applies once the parties agree to deal electronically. Where a law requires written disclosures to a consumer, § 7001(c) adds a consent step. In the EU, eIDAS article 25 stops a court rejecting an electronic signature only for being electronic. What a fast round mustn't skip is the evidence: who signed, which version, and when.

Run through this before the next contract goes out:

• Is the text final and approved internally?
• Template used, or a good reason not to.
• Every field placed for every signer, with what you know pre-filled.
• Signer emails checked against the person who actually signs for that company.
• Deadline set in the tool and written in the message.
• Order: parallel, unless there's a real reason for a sequence.
• ID check only where the contract justifies it.
• First reminder planned for day two, a personal follow-up after the second one.
• Signed copy filed the day it completes.

None of it needs new software. Most of an electronic signature workflow's speed comes from the sender. The tool holds the dates and does the chasing you tell it to do.