8 min read

Documents & e-signature

Generate the documents your business needs from your own records, send them for legally binding electronic signature, and let your agents do both. Signers get an email with a secure link — no account, no login — or sign inside their portal. Every request is a record in your app, so agents notice when something is signed and carry on.

What gets added to your app

Turn documents on from Settings → Documents (templates that use it, like Real Estate, do this at install). Stacker adds three tables:

Form templates

The documents you produce: an uploaded PDF form with signature fields placed on it, or a generated document written with merge tags that pull from a record. Each knows who signs (its roles) and what it needs asking at send time (its inputs).

Signature requests

One per envelope: the unsigned PDF, its status (draft → sent → partially signed → completed, or declined / cancelled / expired), and when complete the signed PDF and a certificate of completion. Link them to your own records — a closing, a client, a project — with relation fields you add.

Signers

One per person on a request: name, email, role, order, and their own progress (sent, viewed, signed, declined). Portal users see the requests where they are a signer.

Status, timestamps, signed copies and counts on these tables are written by Stacker as people sign. Everything else — extra fields, relations, views, permissions — is yours, the same as any other table.

Two kinds of template

Uploaded PDF forms

Upload your association's form (or a Word document) and place signature, initials, date, name, text and checkbox fields on the pages, each assigned to a role. Or put text tags in the document itself — {{sign:buyer}}, {{initials:seller}}, {{date_signed:buyer}}, {{text:buyer "Phone"}} — in white text if you like, and the fields are placed for you on upload. Add | optional to a tag the signer may skip; checkboxes are optional unless you write | required, since they usually come in either/or pairs. If the PDF is already fillable — a TREC contract, an IRS form, most association forms — its own blanks are imported: signature and date lines go to the role printed under them (Buyer, Seller, Buyer's Broker…), page-footer initials boxes too, and every other blank becomes a sender field you can bind to a record path so it is filled in before sending.

Generated documents

Write the document with merge tags and Stacker renders a PDF from a record when it is sent: {{property.address}} reads through relations, {{price | currency}} formats, {{input:newClosingDate}} asks the sender for a value, {{#if …}} and {{#each …}} vary the text, {{ai: instruction}} has an agent write a passage from the record, and the same signature tags place the fields.

Signer roles can name where to find each person from the record — deal.members[0], parties[closing=this, role=buyer][0] — with || to try alternatives, so a request created from a record already has its signers filled in.

Sending and signing

From a record page, Send for signature picks a template, asks for its inputs, shows the signers it resolved for you to check, and sends. Signers receive an email from your brand with a secure link. The signing page shows the document, asks for consent to sign electronically, walks them field by field, lets them draw, type or upload a signature, and stamps the PDF as they finish. Sequential requests invite the next signer when the previous one finishes; reminders go out on the cadence you set until the link expires.

Logged-in portal users see the requests waiting for them on their Documents page and sign right there — no emailed link needed. Anyone else can be given a signing link to copy, or sign in person on your device.

When the last signer finishes, Stacker seals the PDF (every signature, initial, date and field stamped in), produces a certificate of completion — who signed, when, from which address, how they were verified, the document's hash before and after — and emails both to everyone. The request's status flips to completed, which is what your agents and automations watch for.

What agents can do

Read documents

List templates and requests, see who has signed, check which merge paths a template will resolve for a record.

Prepare signature requests

Generate a document from a template and record, create the request with the right signers and fields, add or fix signers, cancel and re-issue — nothing is emailed. Mirror envelopes from DocuSign or Dropbox Sign so they show in the same list.

Send signature requests

Press Send, remind signers, mint signing links. Even with this grant an agent only sends when Settings → Documents has “Let agents send requests themselves” on; otherwise it prepares the draft and tells a person where to press Send.

Author templates

Create and update templates from a description, a Word document or a PDF with text tags — for building the library, not day-to-day sending.

Because requests are records, wake your agent on them: a record-chat channel on your closing (or deal, or project) that watches signatureRequests via its closing relation runs the agent the moment a request completes, is declined or expires — file the signed copy, tick the milestone, tell the owner.

Using another e-sign system

If your business already runs DocuSign or Dropbox Sign, you can keep it and still have one list. Signature requests carry a provider, the provider's externalId, externalStatus and externalUrl; post status changes to the app (from a webhook workflow, a connector sync, or by telling an agent) and the request converges — same portal list, same Signatures panel, same agent wakes. Stacker reflects mirrored requests but never acts on them: people work them in the provider through the link.

Endpoint: POST /api/internal/v1/apps/{slug}/documents/requests/external with provider, externalId, externalStatus, title, optional signers, subject, links and the executed PDF's URL.

Legal validity and evidence

Consent

Every signer agrees to use electronic records and signatures before they can fill anything (the ESIGN Act disclosure, versioned and hashed), and can decline at any point or ask the sender for a paper copy.

Identity

A unique emailed link per signer, optionally protected with an access code you share out of band or a text-message code. Links are single-signer, expire, and are revoked once used.

Audit trail

A hash-chained event log per request — created, sent, opened, consented, each field filled, signed, sealed — with IP address and device, viewable from Settings → Documents and summarised in the certificate of completion.

Stacker's e-signatures are designed to satisfy the U.S. ESIGN Act and UETA and the EU's eIDAS simple electronic signature standard. Some documents (wills, certain real-property conveyances in some states, notarised instruments) still require wet ink or a notary — check your local rules.

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