Adding Bundle Recipients

A ‘bundle recipient’ is a person who will be receiving the bundle to either view or sign a document.

When adding recipients, keep in mind that you might need to prove that the documents were viewed or signed by the intended person. This means that it’s important to have an email and mobile number that you can associate directly to that person (rather than their bookkeeper, personal assistant, or general administration inbox for example).

Learn more about recipients that share email or mobile numbers below.

Related: Learn more about the options for multi-factor Recipient Verification.

Adding Bundle Recipients

Manually

Manually add a recipient to your new bundle by going to the Recipients panel > click New > then enter the recipients name, email, and mobile number > click Create to create a Contact record for your recipient.

Contact records are stored in your FuseSign Contacts.

FuseSign Contacts

Add a recipient from your FuseSign Contacts by going to the Recipients panel > start typing directly into the search bar > select the recipient from the list, or click the magnifying glass to see the advanced recipient search.

As you search for the recipient you can see the contact record source, the last time the contact was used.

Read more about syncing FuseSign Contacts to your practice management system via Contact Data Sync, managing duplicate contacts, and editing contact records in Contact Management.

Recipient Settings

Use the menu corresponding to the recipient to edit contact details, enable SMS notifications, or remove the recipient from the bundle.

Learn more about SMS Reminders.

Recipient Signing Order Groups

Recipient Signing Order Groups gives you granular control over the signing order of your bundle's recipients.

FuseSign will send the bundle to one group at a time, and will progress to the next group automatically and only when the signatures from the preceding group are completed.

A common use case for recipient signing order is to add the Tax Agent as the last signer so that they will not receive the bundle to action until after the clients have signed their Income Tax Returns.

Groups can have as many or as few recipients as you choose, and there is no limit on the number of groups in a bundle. This means that you could have a new group for each signatory if you needed the bundle to progress one by one.

Step 1: Add recipients to your bundle as normal.

Step 2: Click on the recipient you want added to the second signing group and drag into the area marked “Drag here to create a new recipient order group”.

In the example below Bill and Mary will need to complete their signing actions before the bundle is forwarded on to Bill (Jr). Once Bill (Jr) has completed their signing actions the bundle will be forwarded on to Partner 1.

Shared Recipient Details

You will receive an error if two recipients in the same bundle share an identical combination of email and phone number (or identical email only if SMS verification is not in use/no phone number is provided).

This is an intentional feature of the FuseSign platform. If claims are made against the validity of signatures, our audit trail must demonstrate that the signatory is a unique and identifiable person. As such, FuseSign requires recipients that share an email address in the same bundle to have different phone numbers to establish their identity as signers.

This means that:

• In bundles where SMS verification is active, unique mobile numbers must be used for recipients who share an email address.

• In bundles where SMS verification is switched off, email addresses must be unique.

We've designed FuseSign with professional services firms in mind, and we know that shared email addresses are a reality that can cause issues for electronic signatures. Our solution to overcome this is to incorporate SMS for multi-factor authentication, and having credits for that service included as part of the package. It is ultimately to the benefit of the recipients, and our clients, that these measures are in place, should the validity of their signatures ever come into question.

Note: Previously, it was possible to get around this requirement by adding a phone number to only one of the emails, or to add numbers to both recipients but not use SMS verification. This was an unintentional bug that has since been patched.

Overcoming Shared Recipient Details

There are three ways to approach situations where you have shared recipient details:

1. Obtain a different phone number for the second recipient - it is likely that two clients are not sharing the same mobile phone.

2. See if one of the recipients might be able to switch to a separate, non-shared email address. Email is typically free to set up and that may be an easier option.

3. Not recommended: You can send the documents via two separate bundles separately instead of one - one using SMS verification, and one without. This does not resolve the issue that the person without the mobile could still be impersonated by the other with access to the inbox - but it will allow you to send. The downside here is that shared documents won't be counter-signed - we cannot provide legal guidance around signing processes, but this is generally not considered to be a legal requirement.

Although we recommend your firm seek specific legal counsel regarding this, the view of many legal professionals in Australia is that bundles that share emails do not meet the requirement regarding establishing identity, and therefore allowing these documents to be sent as such could create a tenuous legal situation.

The fact is, this situation has never been tested in case law. The only thing that can be used is a reading of the Electronic Transactions Act specifically related to "a method is used to identify the person". When an email address is shared, there is no reasonable way to uniquely identify two or more individuals who have access to the same inbox.

We have heeded that advice from early in the product design of FuseSign, hence why we have hard coded this limitation. It's effectively to protect our clients from legal challenges against documents signed through our platform in the future as robustly as we can. It's our view as a firm that the lack of limitations in these circumstances would be a disservice to our clients.

Updating Active Bundle Recipient Details

It is possible to update the email or phone number of a recipient in an active bundle.

You MUST NOT use these instructions to change a recipient to an entirely different person as this will affect the contact record for the recipient across all active bundles.

Step 1: Open the Active document bundle folder > select the bundle you require.

Step 2: Scroll down to the Bundle Recipients panel > click the three dots to the right of the relevant recipient > select Edit Recipient.

Step 3: You will be presented with the contact record for the recipient.

• If the contact was created from an external source you will not be able to edit it directly - this is to ensure the contact remains connected through to your external data source and maintain the integrity of your client data.

• To continue with editing the contact record select the Source tab > click Convert to Manual Record > Go to the Edit tab > Make the changes > click Save. The record will no longer sync with your external data source.

Step 4: Once you edit the details in an active bundle you will need to trigger a manual reminder to generate a new notification to the recipient at their updated email address.

If you have any questions please contact our support team at support@fuse.work.