Imagine this: You've been in contact with a customer or prospect for months. You've done your best selling, created many quotes, and are ready to close the deal.

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You get the final contract ready to sign and everything is ready to send out. You request the signature – certain that you're about to close the loop – but your contact alerts you that they cannot sign the agreement. It's their boss who has to sign the agreement instead.

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This is a case everyone in sales has experienced at least once in their career and it can be incredibly frustrating. It's the exact challenge that inspired our new featured called “signer reassignment."

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What is Signer Reassignment?

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In short, signer reassignment allows a user who has been given a signature request the ability to “reassign” the signature to another person. In the case above, your contact would no longer need to ask you to negate the original request and send another, but could simply reassign the signature to their boss. This feature offers extra flexibility beyond one simple reassignment.

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In the case above, the boss may receive the signature and they may not feel qualified to sign the agreement either. They have the option to reassign it as well. A signature request can be reassigned up to 4 times for a single signer role.

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How to Use Signer Reassignment

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The Dropbox Sign reassignment functionality comes in two distinct flavors: sending "one off" signatures and sending templates. For one off signatures, signer reassignment is declared at the time of the send. Reassignment for templates is noted when the template is created, and is inherited when the signature is sent.

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In both of these cases, when signer reassignment is enabled, any role in the signature process can reassign their signature. The requestor is always notified when a signature has been reassigned.

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Signer Reassignment and a One Off Signature

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A one off signature is a request made for a document that is not a Dropbox Sign template. These signatures may require the requestor to place signature elements like signer blocks or date fields at the time of the send. (In the case of the Dropbox Sign API, one can also pass in those elements as an array of objects into form_fields_per_document parameter.)

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The design of signer reassignment allows the requestor to determine whether the signature should be can be reassigned at the time of sending the request. This design choice stemmed from customer feedback, specifically on what information a requester may know (or may not know) at the time of sending a signature.

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The user experience for signer reassignment varies between our web application and our API. For the API, the ability to reassign the signature request is a flag set at the time of the API request.

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Signer Reassignment and Templates

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Dropbox Sign templates are preconfigured documents that are designed to make your most frequently signed documents simple to send for signature without having to constantly place signer blocks, initials and other fields. They also allow for merge field data to be passed into the request which can fill in values at run time.

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Signer Reassignment applies to both embedded and non-embedded requesting. Whether a template signature request can be reassigned will be based on how the template is configured. When a template is created, the template creator will note whether signatures sent using this template can be reassigned.

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This design decision stemmed from customer feedback, notably that there are some standard agreements users may expect to get reassigned while there are some that should always be signed by the party a request is sent. The design for this feature applies to the web application and our API.

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Availability

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Signer Reassignment is available to our Enterprise teams and for API plans of Gold and above.