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Contract negotiation

The contract negotiations feature allows you and your recipients to suggest and discuss edits and apply them before signing.

Updated this week

Availability: Business and Enterprise plans

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Our contract negotiations feature allows you and your recipients to easily suggest and discuss edits, then apply them within the document before you sign its finalized version.

Watch an overview video:

The flow is simple:

  1. Enable Suggesting in your template or document, then send it

  2. Recipients suggest edits to the document

  3. You accept or reject each suggestion, then finalize the document

  4. Once finalized, the document is automatically sent to collect signatures from all recipients

That's it! Now let's dig deeper.

How to enable Suggesting mode

Note: Enabling Suggesting mode on the template level allows any document created from this template to inherit this setting.

To allow your recipients to make changes in the document you send them, open the template or document, then select +Add roles/recipients on top of the page. (If you already have roles/recipients added in your template or document, select Manage.) Finally, switch on the toggle for Suggesting.

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Alternatively, you can enable Suggesting in the pop-up when sending a document to recipients.

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You can also enable Suggesting within a document in the workflow settings. Simply click the vertical ellipses on top of the page, then select Workflow and switch on the toggle next to Suggest edits.

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Note: You can enable Suggest edits mode even after the document is sent — your recipient will only need to refresh the page to start suggesting edits.

How to suggest edits to the document

Note: Document recipients can suggest edits only to content in text blocks and tables.

Once a recipient opens your document, they can simply review it, fill out the fields, and sign it if everything looks acceptable to them.

When they decide to edit something in the document, they’ll see a message informing them that all fields they’ve already filled out will be cleared. As soon as they select Start suggesting edits, the document will move to Suggesting mode, and its status will change to “Suggest edits.”

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Recipients are allowed to delete, add, and replace the content inside text blocks and tables. They can also change the text formatting, such as the font, size, underlining the text, or making it bold or italic. As the document owner, you’ll see their suggestions in real time, and all document participants will receive an email notification for each new suggestion.

Reviewers can easily navigate to any new suggestion from the email notification by selecting View in document.

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Note: A suggested edit will be applied to the document once approved by either the document sender or another user with permission to edit the document. Recipients can remove only their own suggestions.

If you’re a document sender, your recipients can easily inform you (and other participants with permission to resolve suggestions) once they’ve finished their edits by selecting the Request review button.

This button appears as soon as any document participant suggests edits to a document. Once a recipient selects Request review, they’ll get a confirmation message and a list of reviewers (senders/recipients that can resolve suggestions).

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Note: The Request review button does not display when the only user with permission to resolve suggestions makes a suggestion themselves.

The button will change to Send reminder once the request is sent.

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Once a recipient requests a review of their suggestions, the document sender and any document participants with permission to resolve suggestions will receive an email notification (as well as an in-app notification if they’re viewing the document at the time).

Tip:

You can turn off real-time notifications for every incoming suggestion in your profile settings, and instead only receive requests from recipients.

Inviting reviewers

If you need to invite someone to review the document, either you or a recipient can invite other reviewers to the document while it’s in “Suggest edits” status. Invited reviewers have the same permissions as other document recipients — they can suggest edits to the content, and also invite reviewers.

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Suggesting content in a locked block

Recipients are allowed to edit content in locked blocks. However, only users with Manager/Admin roles on the account — or users with a custom role allowing them to edit documents and restrict content block editing — can accept suggestions on content in a locked block.

Go here to learn more about account roles.

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Allow recipients to resolve suggestions

You can allow your recipients to resolve suggestions made by a document recipient.

To do this, open the template or document, then select +Add roles/recipients at the top of the page. (If you already have roles/recipients added in your template or document, select Manage.) Finally, switch on the toggle for Resolve suggested edits. By default, this setting is switched off.

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Once you turn on this setting, any recipient will be able to accept and reject suggestions added by the document sender or any document recipient. However, this recipient will be unable to accept their own suggestions and suggestions added to locked blocks.

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You can turn on/off the Resolve suggested edits setting on sent documents, regardless of whether a suggestion has already been added.

The document sender and/or owner will receive an email notification when a recipient has accepted or rejected suggestions.

Other document participants will receive a notification whenever a suggestion they’ve added has been resolved.

How to finalize and send the document

Each suggestion needs to be either accepted or rejected before the document can be finalized and sent to collect signatures.

The document owner, or any user in their account with permission to view and edit documents, can accept or reject recipient suggestions before finalizing the document. (Go here to learn more about user permissions.)

To reject or accept suggestions, select the icon in the suggestion comment box.

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Recipients will receive an email notification when their suggestions are accepted or rejected.

Once all suggestions have been resolved, the document will be automatically sent after you select Finalize.

Note: If your document has approval flow enabled, you’ll be presented with Send for approval as an option, rather than Finalize.

How to track suggestions

There are two ways you can review suggestions that have been added to your document:

  1. Under Version history

  2. Under Resolved comments/suggestions

To open version history, either select the latest update under the document name, or select the vertical ellipsis at the top of the page, then select Version history. Here you’ll see only suggestions accepted by users with permission to do so. When you select an accepted suggestion, it will be highlighted and you’ll be automatically navigated to it.

Each accepted suggestion contains additional information about:

  • Suggestion author

  • The user who accepted the suggestion

  • Date and time when the suggestion was accepted

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Note: Only the document sender and users with permission to view the document can view version history with accepted changes.

To review resolved suggestions, select the vertical ellipsis at the top of the page, then select Resolved comments/suggestions.

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Here you can review both accepted and rejected suggestions. You can also filter a list to show suggestions only, and choose which suggestions you’d like to see — “Accepted” or “Rejected.”

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Document recipients can review accepted and rejected suggestions by selecting Other actions > Resolved suggestions.

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Suggesting with Signing order

In case you have both Signing order and Suggesting enabled in your document, your best option is to share it with recipients via link. This way, recipients can add suggestions to the document simultaneously. Once the document is finalized, recipients will need to sign it one by one.

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If you decide to send the document to recipients via email, the first signer will have to sign the document twice. This is necessary not only to push the document onward to the ensuing signers, but to complete the document once all parties have finished document negotiation.

If you share your document via email rather than via link, here’s how recipients can suggest edits and sign your document with signing order enabled:

  1. After you send the document, the first signer will suggest edits

  2. Once you accept or reject these edits, you can finalize the document, then send it

  3. The first signer will sign the document, then the signing order will continue to the next recipient

  4. If the next recipient suggests edits, previously filled-out fields will be cleared

  5. Once you accept or reject these new edits, you can send the finalized version to collect signatures from your recipients.

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