Every signing link we issue can carry a deadline. Past it, the link stops working, the document is marked expired, and nobody can add a signature to it. Picking that window is a real decision, so it is worth five minutes of thought rather than always accepting the default.
Why an expiry helps you
A signing link is a bearer credential: whoever holds it can sign as the person it was issued to. That is what makes signing frictionless - no account, no password - and it is also why the link should not live forever. Email archives get breached. Laptops get sold. A link with a deadline shrinks the window in which any of that matters.
A deadline is also a nudge. “This expires on the 14th” moves a document up someone’s list in a way “please sign when you can” never does.
Rough guide by document type
- 7 days - time-sensitive commercial terms: quotes, offers, anything with a price that moves. If it goes stale, you want it dead rather than signed late.
- 14 to 30 days - the everyday default. Contracts, NDAs, engagement letters, mandates. Long enough to survive a holiday, short enough to stay current.
- 60 to 90 days- documents that travel through several hands, or where a counterparty’s own approval process is slow. Board packs, multi-party agreements, anything routed sequentially through a chain of five people.
- Never expires - use sparingly. It is right for open-ended internal forms, and wrong for anything with commercial terms in it.
What happens at the deadline
Nothing is deleted. Signatures already collected stand, the audit trail is untouched, and the document stays in your dashboard marked expired. What changes is that every outstanding link is invalidated and we email you a list of who had not signed, so you can duplicate the document and send it again with a fresh deadline.
One thing worth knowing: a link can never outlive its document. If you resend a signing email a day before the deadline, the new link still expires with the document rather than granting another month. The deadline you set is the deadline that holds.
Reminders do the chasing
An expiry date works best paired with reminders. Leave them on and we nudge outstanding signers after three days, then every three days, up to three times - and never past the deadline, because a reminder pointing at a dead link is worse than no reminder. In a sequential flow only the person whose turn it is gets chased. You can turn reminders off per document when the signer is someone you would rather chase yourself.
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