Announcing Jotform Sign

There are several ways to access the Jotform Sign Builder:

• Click the Create Sign Document button on the Jotform Sign homepage.
• Start with any of 600+ e-sign compatible PDF templates.
• Click Create Form on the My Forms homepage.
• Click Create Sign Document on the My Documents homepage (note: unless you’re a beta user it’s unlikely you’ll have any e-sign documents yet).

For our purposes, let’s start from the My Forms page. Upon clicking Create Form, you’ll see the option to create a signable document.

You can then drag and drop your document into the frame, upload it, or use a demo document just to try out the features.

Here I’ve selected the demo document. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the Jotform Sign builder is a slimmed down version of our form builder from a user interface standpoint.

Jotform Sign Builder: Build tab preview

At the top of the page, you’ll see the Detect Fields button above the document. (This button will appear for any static document you upload but won’t be needed for already e-signable PDF templates.) Clicking the button basically converts any static fields Jotform Sign recognizes into editable and movable Jotform Sign Builder elements.

Speaking of those elements, you’ll see a list of them in the left panel. You can use them to build and edit your signable document.

These basic elements are fairly straightforward; however, each contains a properties menu that gives you additional options. 
In the properties of the Signature element, you can designate the signature fields for multiple signers. In my sample document, I’ve designated the first signer as Brother 1 and the second signer as myself.

Any of the other fields I include in my signable document can, among other things, be assigned to either Brother 1 or myself.

For example, if we open the email field’s properties window, it will include the option to

• Assign the field to either myself or Brother 1 (as noted above, you can also do this on the element itself)
• Make the field required 
• Disallow the entry of email addresses from free services like Gmail or Yahoo
• Confirm the field with dual entry
• Prepopulate the field and make it read only

In addition to basic identification fields, the builder also includes some familiar elements like short text, dropdown options, and multiple-choice questions.  Switch on the Preview Document toggle on the top right of your screen to see a preview. Click the appropriate icon to preview the signable document in desktop, tablet, or mobile phone mode.

You can also preview the document by all roles or as one of the document recipients.

While this is only a preview of the document, you have the ability to send it to signers by clicking the button on the bottom right of your screen.

In the Jotform Sign Builder’s Settings tab, you can rename your signable document. You can also customize the email subject line and the message the recipient will see should you choose to send the document via email.

Uploading a document

As mentioned earlier, you can upload an existing PDF into the Jotform Sign Builder. Just drag and drop your PDF to upload it.

Your document will be uploaded in seconds. Click the Create Signable Document button, then click the green field detection button to convert your static document. Now you can customize your document by adding fields or assign it for signature as is.

Our AI-powered field detection is based on optical character recognition (OCR). Simply put, OCR is a process that converts an image of text into machine-readable text format.

When it comes to Jotform Sign, the fundamental tenet of machine learning holds true: As more data gets processed, the better the AI becomes at recognizing and converting documents.

For instance, our field detection took 10 seconds to convert this particular PDF document; however, at this time next year, after more documents have been uploaded and more fields detected platform-wide, it may take less time to convert because the accuracy increases based on how much the machine has learned.

Further on we’ll discuss how your document is automatically stored and ways to manage it.

The good news is that instead of dealing with paper documents, separate silos for document storage, and complicated creation/signing hurdles, Jotform Sign handles all of it in a snap.

Jotform Sign templates

If you don’t want to upload a document or create one from scratch, you can use one of our Jotform Sign templates. Our templates are great for getting started or getting your creative juices flowing, but remember that you can customize them to fit your needs as well.

Visit our library where you can find hundreds of helpful Jotform Sign agreement and contract templates.

Jotform Sign Builder: Send tab preview

Some of Jotform Sign’s most creative features are housed within the Send tab of the builder. Here you have multiple options for sending your document for signature, including adding an extra layer of security.

First, you’ll see options to manage your signer details. You can enter or change their email address, set a unique code for them to access the document, enter a message, view sent documents, and create a link they can use to access and sign your document.

If your document requires one signature to occur before others in sequence, you can set the signing order as well.

Sending a signable document is as easy as clicking Create Link and then Copy Link.

The Options tab lets you automate the frequency of reminder emails (from every day to every seven days) and set a date for your document to expire. These options can be helpful based on the urgency of your document.

You can also indicate whether you want the signer to have the ability to designate another signer and CC other stakeholders by email.

The Embed option in the left panel allows you to generate and copy code so you or your developer can add your document directly to your website.

Additionally, when you click the Preview button, you can see an example of what the page will look like once it’s embedded within your site.

Note: If you create a link or create embed code for your website, you can have only one role/signer for your document.

After I send an email invitation to sign my document, my interface will confirm it’s been sent.

Jotform Sign: The signer perspective

The experience of the signer is just as important as that of the document owner for a successful e-signature workflow. Here’s a quick 1-2-3 walk-through of what your signer will see.

1. Your signer will get an email invitation to review and sign the document.

2. When they click the Review & Sign Document button, the document will appear in a new browser tab. They can select a signature style or draw the signature themselves.

When ready, they’ll be asked to confirm that they agree to use an e-signature.

3. Upon confirming the signature, your recipient will get a final confirmation email that the document has been completed.
   
   When they view the document details, they’ll see the document history and digital audit trail.

Jotform Sign: The document owner perspective

Jotform Sign’s automations extend to tracking your in-progress and completed documents.

In your Sent Documents, simply hover over the pop-out icon on the right and click it to see the document status in Jotform Inbox.

The completed document, along with the audit trail, is automatically stored in the document owner’s Jotform Sign Inbox. The document owner can download the signed document here. Also present are tabs for additional document stages, such as Canceled, Declined, Waiting for Others, and Waiting for My Signature.

You can toggle between your documents by clicking the arrow next to the document name at the top middle of the screen.

My other sample document is listed as In progress for status and under the Waiting for Others tab. I can send a reminder email to my signer directly from this interface as well.

Jotform Sign security

We’ve worked hard to ensure your signed documents are protected by an industry leading level of security.

Creating a secure product that produces legally binding e-signatures involves higher encryption levels and compliance with regulations and laws like SOC 2 Type II, the E-Sign Act, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.

We know that our reputation depends on how well we secure the information you’ve entrusted with us in your forms, and we’ll continue to lead the industry in this regard.

Learn more about Jotform’s security standards.

As mentioned above, Jotform Sign works best when used as part of our larger platform to automate your workflow. Here are a few ways you can turbocharge — and creatively reimagine — how you collect and manage e-signatures along with your other responsibilities.

The Signature widget

Jotform Sign makes it easier than ever for you to create a signable form, document, or PDF.

In the form builder, we’ve replaced our native e-signature widget with the new Jotform Sign Signature widget. To add an e-signature field to any form, simply drag and drop the widget from the Form Elements bar on the left.

Click the green pen icon to enable Jotform Sign automation for the widget. When your form is submitted, you and the signer will receive a completed, legally binding PDF document along with a digital audit trail. 

It may look innocuous (and it’s meant to be simple), but the capabilities in the old signature widget compared to the new one are night and day.

E-signature form widget capabilities
	Old e-signature form widget	New e-signature form widget
Collects a signature	✅	✅
Digital audit trail	❌	✅
PDF of the submission including e-signature	❌	✅
PDF and audit trail stored in Inbox	❌	✅
Recipient must consent to use e-signatures	❌	✅

Mobile access

The Jotform Sign Signature widget is fully compatible on mobile and the Jotform Mobile Forms app, so you can collect legally binding e-signatures on any device. Plus, while PDFs don’t typically render well on mobile devices, our team worked to ensure an elegant mobile experience for you and your signers.

Mobile forms provide a perfect solution for remote healthcare workers, notaries, youth sports leaders, real estate professionals, and more. It’s easy for you to both create and collect e-signature forms on mobile or add such forms into your own app with Jotform Apps.

PDF Editor

Collecting e-signatures through PDFs in Jotform, whether one of our templates or your own, is a worry-free process. Our free online PDF Editor provides many instantly compatible e-sign templates.

The fillable fields in each compatible PDF template are aligned with the field elements of our Jotform Sign Builder.

After choosing a PDF, you’re just three clicks away from customizing the document to fit your needs.

There are situations when a signed document needs approval from one or more people: requisitions, promotions, salary bumps, loan applications, and so on.

For those who use Jotform Approvals to automate this process, adding a legally binding e-signature document will save you even more time by eliminating manual and/or parallel workflows.

For example, I added my document to this flow so that once an application is submitted and approved, a new document will automatically be emailed to the applicant for signature. Once they sign and submit it, the approval workflow will be completed. No sweat.

Additionally, in scenarios when you need more than one signature, your approval process becomes even more efficient.

Jotform Tables

Your signed document will flow automatically into Jotform Tables. Aside from automatically and securely storing your signed documents, Tables allows you to collaborate on/share the document with relevant stakeholders. You can also download the document from your table.

Jotform Sign: Designed with automation in mind

It’s the product team’s job to take the highest priorities of our customers into consideration when building the actual product.

In the case of Jotform Sign, it was our “Muse” product team, whose prior experience working with our PDF Editor and Smart PDF Forms was key to building an e-signature solution.

This five-person team (plus a product manager) set out in late 2020 to solve a central issue: how to create a unique e-signature product that could both benefit our users in new ways and be successful in an already crowded marketplace.

They came to understand that our users needed an e-signature solution that catered to an underserved market: small and mid-sized businesses.

After conducting an analysis, they learned that many of our users just needed to create a simple document for collecting signatures. Soon, an e-signature prototype that was simple and easy to use was born.

They learned more along the way. Building this product in-house meant getting up to speed on product fundamentals like security protocols (new document encryption and dual access integrity), workflow, and new tech gaps.

The aha moment

The team also discovered there was still a learning curve among customers about how, when, and where e-signatures can be used. For example, current PDF template users envisioned manually sending the document to someone to sign it, unaware that they could use automation for this process (via an automated email request), which would speed up their workflow.

That’s when the learning curves of building a native e-signature product turned into huge potential benefits in e-signature automation. The result is something unique to the e-signature marketplace.

Existing PDF templates that have signature fields can be easily converted, and existing form templates can cross over, so many active users who are already using Jotform automations via Tables, Approvals, email notifications, and more will be able to seamlessly insert e-signatures into their workflows.

The Muse team understood that the best way to increase productivity is by layering Jotform Sign within other automations to power your workflow.

Hence, “e-signatures meet automation.”

How the team differentiated Jotform Sign

The Jotform Sign team made every effort to convert customer insights into valuable features. For example, they learned

• The market wants templates! This was good news. Though industry leaders may offer a small number of e-signature templates at an additional cost, we already had hundreds of templates that could be customized for a new e-signature product. It’s a natural differentiator to create a document in Jotform Sign and send it multiple times.
• Approximately 60 percent of users want to invite people to sign with a link. Surprisingly, many providers in the industry don’t offer this simple feature. So Muse built the “invite link,” which makes it easy to copy a link and share a document with multiple people to collect e-signatures.
• Folks want to collect signatures by embedding a “signable” document into their website. Now users can add a document to their website for signatures and collect those signatures as easily as they collect information from a form.

These are all great examples of the user led development principles that help make what we think are the most user-friendly, feature-rich, and beneficial products.

With the assistance of many other stakeholders (including our stellar UXR team), the Muse team has created a new e-signature product that provides value to our customers through features that haven’t yet been seen in the market.

To learn more about Jotform Sign, be sure to register for our webinar on Thursday, October 20th!

A word about pricing

Jotform Sign is free to use. Yep, you read that right. Regardless of what plan you have, anyone can get 10 document signatures per month — meaning you collect 10 unique signatures from your documents.

For those who require more signing capacity, we have paid plans that offer more flexibility for your needs.

Jotform Sign tutorials

If you’re not sure where to start with Jotform Sign, or have additional questions, check out some of our tutorials:

• How to Use Jotform Sign
• How to Upload Your PDF to Jotform Sign
• How to Download Your Signed and Completed Document
• All About the Auto-detect Fields on Your Sign Documents
• How to Restore an Expired Signature Request
• Adding an E-signature in the Jotform App Builder
• How to request electronic signatures with Jotform Approvals
• How to Preview Document From a Different Signer’s Point of View
• How to set an access code for your documents
• How to Set an Expiration Date in Jotform Sign
• How to Power Your Signature Widget in Your Forms With Jotform Sign
• How to add CC emails to your document
• How to Allow Signers to Delegate the Document to Other Signers
• How to Set an Auto Reminder for Your Sign Documents
• How to track the signing process of other parties
• Does Jotform Sign offer legally binding signatures?
• How to Send Your Document to Someone to Be Signed
• How to Use a Sign Template and Customize it in Sign Builder

Workflow automation — it’s the yellow brick road that leads to a promise of greater organizational productivity.

It’s why the average company has an eye-popping 254 SaaS apps, and the majority of teams use between 40 and 60 apps each. We’re chasing the sweet spot that will help us work smarter and be more efficient, more cost-effective, and more productive.

Every phase of our product development involves understanding what’s most important to you so we can build better workflow automation on the whole. And it was clear to us that you and your teams favor products that solve the most cross-functional needs.

In addition, your demand for (and usage of) our native e-signature widget grew into something big. Nearly 100K users received at least one form submission that included an e-signature in the last 30 days alone.

This growth spurred over two years of research and interviews to better understand the whys of your e-signature use, not only within Jotform but the industry at large.

Jotform Sign is built for automation — from document generation to e-signatures to approval workflows and document management. You can choose from hundreds of PDF templates that already have signature fields, or sit back while AI-powered field detection automatically converts your uploaded PDF for signature.

Managing your e-signatures in Jotform means easier collaboration with your team and seamless integration with your approval workflows, inbox, and third-party solutions. It’s an e-signature solution backed by industry leading security, featuring a digital audit trail and document sharing via a secure link to collect signatures easily.

Simply put, Jotform Sign is a smarter way to send and sign documents.

Although it’s just the beginning for Jotform Sign, we’ll continue listening to you and gathering your feedback to make it a better product, today and down the road.

We encourage you to use Jotform Sign and let us know what you think so we can make it the most valuable (and flexible) solution for your e-signature needs.