Availability: Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans
Roles are placeholders that help you pre-assign fields to future recipients. When you create a document from your template, each role carries over as a role container — a group that holds all the fields and variables assigned to that role, ready for a recipient to be assigned.
You can assign a recipient to each role when you create the document, or come back to it later. Either way, the fields stay intact and grouped until you're ready. If a particular role isn't needed on a specific document, you can remove it — or combine two roles into one if the same person is filling both.
Additionally, you can easily populate contact information about your recipient in the document using Role variables.
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How to add template roles
Open your template and select Define roles on the right-hand panel.
Then, type the name of the Role (i.e. Client, Sales Rep, etc.) in the field and click on Create role.
If you're in the editing mode, you can access and manage Roles in two ways:
Select File on the top left menu > Roles > Add new role
Select Manage roles on the left-hand panel
Note: Role names are internal and visible only to you and your team members.
How to pre-assign a recipient
If you'd like a specific recipient to be added in every document created from this template (for example, you want one of your colleagues always added in CC), you can create a role for this person and pre-assign them to this role:
Select Define roles in the workflow builder panel.
Choose a role, and select three vertical ellipses button to its right
Select Pre-assign a person
Search for a recipient's contact by starting to type their name or email or create a recipient/group.
Finally, click Pre-assign.
Now, each time the document is created from the template, this recipient will be assigned to this role.
Make sure that all fields in your template are assigned to your role(s). When a document is created from the template, role containers carry those field assignments over automatically.
What happens on the document
When someone creates a document from this template, each role appears in the Recipients panel as a role container. Roles that don't have a pre-assigned recipient show up with a placeholder name (e.g. Add Client) and a red dot.
From there, the document creator can:
Assign a recipient to fill the role — all fields assigned to that role transfer to them automatically
Remove the role from that document — with the option to unassign its fields, delete them, or reassign them to another recipient
Combine two roles into one — if the same person is handling both, their fields and variables merge under a single recipient
For step-by-step instructions on each of these actions, see Roles on the document.
FAQ
What happens if you don't assign a recipient to your role?
Unassigned roles appear in the document as role containers — the fields stay grouped and intact. The document creator can assign a recipient later, remove the role, or combine it with another. Nothing is lost just because a role isn't filled immediately.
Note: This behavior applies to documents created with the new document experience. On the legacy editor, unassigned roles are not shown in the document but their fields remain and need to be manually reassigned or removed.