One setting, chosen at send time
When a document goes out to more than one person, you pick a signing order: one at a time, or all at once. In the industry these are called sequential and parallel routing, and the choice is recorded on the document at the moment you send it.
That timing matters. The setting is not a preference you can flip afterwards from the status view — it is part of what the send did, alongside minting each signer's link and moving the document out of draft. If you sent all-at-once and wish you had staged it, the route back is to withdraw the request — which invalidates the outstanding links immediately — duplicate the document into a fresh draft, and send that instead.
So it is worth thirty seconds of thought before you press send. The rest of this guide is what each mode actually does, verified against how the product behaves rather than how routing is usually described.
All at once: what parallel routing does
Parallel routing invites everyone in the same moment. Each signer receives their own invitation with their own private link, nobody holds a position in a queue, and any of them can sign first, last, or at 2am from a phone. The document completes when the final outstanding signature lands and every required field on the page has a value.
This is the right default for independent signers. Three flatmates on a tenancy agreement, two partners on a mutual NDA, four attendees on separate waivers: none of them needs to wait for another, so making them wait only adds days.
The trade-off is that you spend all the invitations up front and lose control of order. If one signer needs to see the finished document before committing — the classic case being your own countersignature — parallel gives you no way to guarantee you go last.
One at a time: what sequential routing does
Sequential routing uses the order in which you listed the signers. Only the first person is emailed when you send. Everyone else already has a valid link, but a turn gate holds them: open it early and the page says the document is being signed in order and promises to email them when their turn comes.
Each completed signature releases the next invitation automatically, moments after the previous signer finishes. You are not standing over it forwarding emails; the relay runs itself, and each hand-off is written into the audit trail with its own timestamp, which is how you later show that the agreed process was followed rather than asserting it.
Use it when authority runs in a direction: an employee acknowledges a policy before the manager approves, a contractor signs before the finance lead countersigns, a request moves up a chain where the second signature only makes sense once the first exists.
Order controls who is asked, not who sees what
This is the part most explanations skip, and it changes how you should think about sequential routing. Every signer's page shows only the fields assigned to them. A later signer in a sequential flow does not open the document to find the earlier signer's typed answers waiting in the boxes — those values are theirs, on their side of the request.
What everyone gets is the finished article. When the last signature lands, the completed document is sealed into a tamper-evident PDF carrying every party's input, and that copy goes to the owner and to each signer, alongside a Certificate of Completion listing who did what and when.
So if your real requirement is “Ana must read what Luis wrote before she signs,” signing order alone will not deliver it. Put the shared content in the document itself rather than in a field, or run it as two documents: collect Luis's information first, then build the agreement Ana signs.
Reminders, declines and withdrawals
Reminders behave differently in each mode, and the rules are enforced rather than advisory. You can nudge any signer who has not yet responded while the request is still open, capped at one reminder per signer per hour so nobody gets buried. In a sequential flow you cannot skip ahead: an attempt to remind someone whose turn has not arrived is refused, because the person actually holding things up is the one before them.
Declines are blunter than most people expect. If any signer declines, the entire request ends — the document moves to declined, every outstanding link stops working, and you receive an email with the signer's stated reason. That is deliberate: a contract that half the parties rejected should not keep quietly gathering signatures. A declined request cannot be reopened, so to continue you address the objection, duplicate the document into a new draft and send that.
You can also withdraw a document yourself at any point before it completes, with an optional reason. Every open link dies instantly, and the withdrawal is recorded on the audit trail with the state the document was in. Signing links also expire on their own 30 days after they were sent, in either mode.
What each mode costs against your monthly sends
Both modes send the same number of invitations in the end; the difference is when. Parallel spends one emailed send per signer the moment you press send. Sequential spends one now, then one more each time the relay advances. Reminders count as one each, and when the document completes, the final copy goes to the owner and every signer, which counts too.
Concretely, a four-signer agreement with no reminders costs four invitations plus five completion copies either way. If it stalls after two signatures, sequential will have spent two invitations and parallel four — a small, real saving on a plan with a monthly cap.
The free plan includes 30 emailed sends a month, with paid plans raising that allowance and removing the small tuyaform credit from the signing page. Sharing links costs nothing at all and is unlimited on every plan: if you would rather not spend the allowance, send the document without email delivery and copy each signer's link from the status view into your own messages. The turn gate still applies in sequential mode, so a copied link for signer three stays politely closed until signer two is finished.
Choosing in practice
Default to all at once. Most multi-signer documents involve people who do not depend on each other, and parallel gets them done in hours instead of a week of relay. Switch to one at a time when order carries meaning: approvals, countersignatures, anything where a later signature is a review of an earlier one.
A few situations decide themselves. If one signer is famously slow and the others are not, parallel keeps them from blocking anybody. If a document needs an internal approval before it reaches a customer, sequential is the whole point. If you are collecting the same document from dozens of unrelated people, neither routing is the right tool — that is a shared link or a bulk send.
One last practical note: whichever you choose, the audit trail records the sent, viewed and signed events per signer with timestamps, so the sequence is evidenced either way. Sequential enforces the order; parallel documents whatever order actually happened. This guide describes how the routing behaves, not what a signature is worth in a dispute — that depends on the underlying agreement and the law that applies to it, and it is not legal advice.