Most people send a document for signatures and assume the process is straightforward. But if you've ever had a contract signed by the wrong person first, or watched a legal agreement fall apart because a counter-signature arrived before the primary party had even reviewed it — you already know that signing order can be just as important as the signature itself.
GoodSign was built around this reality. Not every document needs the same workflow, and forcing every signing process into a single rigid pattern wastes time and creates avoidable errors.
Sequential signing means signers receive the document one after another, in a specific order. Signer B doesn't get the document until Signer A has completed their part. This matters enormously in situations where one signature is conditional on another — think employment contracts where a candidate signs first, then a hiring manager counter-signs to confirm approval.
Parallel signing means all signers receive the document simultaneously and can sign in any order. No one is waiting on anyone else. This works well for multi-party agreements where every signer holds equal standing and there's no dependency between signatures.
Choosing the wrong workflow for the context isn't just inefficient — it can undermine the legal integrity of the document or create confusion about who approved what.
Counter-signing documents online is the most common sequential use case. An employment offer letter, a supplier agreement, or a client services contract typically has a defined hierarchy: the external party signs first to indicate acceptance, and the internal authority counter-signs to confirm the deal is official.
Other situations where signing order matters:
Getting the sequence wrong in any of these contexts isn't a minor administrative error. It can invalidate the document or trigger a full re-signing process.
Not every document carries a hierarchy. Multi-party legal agreements — joint venture contracts, co-founder agreements, partnership deeds — often work best with parallel signing. All parties are equally bound, none is subordinate to another, and holding everyone up while waiting for a specific person to go first adds friction without adding value.
Parallel signing also suits bulk sending scenarios. If you're distributing an updated freelancer agreement to 50 contractors, you don't need them signing in any particular order relative to each other. You need them to sign, period. Sending in parallel gets documents back faster — which is why 65.3% of documents sent through GoodSign are signed within 24 hours.
The practical rule: use sequential when signatures represent a chain of approval. Use parallel when signatures represent independent consent.
Setting up either workflow doesn't require technical knowledge or a call with a support team. GoodSign's drag-and-drop document designer lets you define exactly how each signing process should run.
For sequential workflows, you assign each signer a specific position in the order. Signer 1 receives the envelope first. Once they complete their fields and sign, the next notification automatically goes to Signer 2. This is how you handle counter-signing without manual follow-up or awkward email chains asking "did you get my contract?"
For parallel workflows, all signers are assigned simultaneously. Everyone gets notified at the same time, fills in their designated fields, and the document progresses as signatures are collected — in whatever order they arrive.
Witness signing is handled as a role within this same system. You designate a witness signer who receives the document after the primary party has signed. The sequence is enforced automatically, removing any ambiguity about whether the witness signature was truly contemporaneous.
The full audit trail logs every action against a timestamp — who opened the document, when they signed, what IP address and device was used. For counter-signing workflows especially, this record is critical. It proves not just that signatures exist, but that they happened in the correct, legally valid sequence.
Complex signing workflows shouldn't cost more than simple ones. With GoodSign, every envelope costs $1.50 — regardless of how many signers are involved, whether the workflow is sequential or parallel, and whether you
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