The ability for a recipient to decline an agreement can be configured at the account or group level, and when enabled, there are tools available to help close the feedback loop on why the agreement was declined.

The ability to allow for declining and capturing a custom reason is available to all tiers of service.

The options to define your own list of decline reasons and expose the decline button in the footer banner are only available at the enterprise tier of service.

How it's used

When the group or account enables the feature set to decline agreements, the Decline to sign option is inserted into the Options menu on the e-signing page:

If a recipient elects to decline their action, they are presented with a list of pre-defined reasons and/or an option to enter their own custom reason for declining (depending on how the feature set is configured):

Once the agreement is declined, the agreement is canceled, and the originator of the agreement is notified.

Activity and Audit Report entries

The action to decline an agreement is recorded on the transaction record in two places:

The Activity record of the agreement
The Audit Report derived from the transaction

Decline - Activity report — Activity report

Note:

The comment used for declining is only exposed on the Activity list, not the Audit Report.

Recover the reasons to decline

The reason for declining an agreement can be reviewed either on the agreement in the Activity section (as described above) or by running a Report that contains the agreement.

The Recipient Rejection Reason column(s) come after the individual recipient data:

Configuration options

Individual, business, and small business customers can allow the decline option, and require that a custom reason be provided.

Because a list of reasons isn't available for these tiers of service, a custom reason is captured

At the enterprise level of service, the Decline reasons feature set includes five configurable options.

Allow signers to decline is the primary enablement toggle, and must be enabled to access the four other options

Allow signers to decline

Enabling this top-level setting inserts the option for most recipient roles to decline the agreement, canceling it in the process.

Recipients assigned the Certified Recipient role are explicitly excluded and the option to allow them to decline must be discretely configured by Success or Support.

Acceptors: Enable Decline button

When enabled, recipients with the Acceptor role see a Decline/Accept button set on the footer of the e-sign page.

The Decline to sign option is still included in the Options menu

Require signers to provide a reason

When the Require signers to provide a reason option is enabled, decliners are offered a list of reasons for the decline:

The reasons to decline are configured by the account/group admin and at least one reason must be defined or an error is generated:

To create a new decline reason, click the plus icon to expose the Create overlay:

There are three elements required to define the decline reason:

Decline to sign reason name - The nominal name of the reason record.
- Provided to facilitate sorting of reasons that may span various languages
Decline to sign reason text - This is the actual text that is inserted into the Activity record and reporting field.
- The reason text is limited to 1000 characters or less
- The recipient will see the full text in the selection window
Language - Only reasons that have a matching Language value for the signer's environment are presented as options. If you send agreements using the French locale, then only the reasons flagged for the French language will be selectable
- If the signer is using a locale that has no pre-defined Reason match, a custom reason is accepted

Once the reason is properly configured, click Save.

The reason becomes available for all signers immediately.

To Edit or Delete a reason from the list, single click the reason to select it.

The actions to Edit or Delete appear in the upper-left of the section:

Allow signers to provide a custom reason

Enabling the custom reason feature provides the recipient the option to manually enter their own reason in their own words:

Display combined list of decline reasons form account and group

The option to combine both the account-level and group-level decline reasons is only available when configuring the group-level controls.

Leveraging this option allows for creating a core set of universal decline reasons at the account level, and then adding in specialized reasons at the group level designed explicitly for the content generated from that group.

Things to know...

The Certified Recipient role is explicitly omitted from the Decline Reason set of controls. Customers who need to allow Certified Recipients to decline an agreement must engage their Success or Support contact to have the option enabled.

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Configure Decline options for recipients

Overview