Thursday's closing needs three signatures.
Two are in.
Finding out whose is missing costs four phone calls and most of an afternoon.
Getting a document signed is the solved part. Knowing where it is stuck is where the days actually go.
A letter can hand its blanks to people outside your company. That was the last post. This one is about the fortnight afterwards.
Each named party gets a card of its own on the order, in the place staff already look.
The card carries their name, how far along they are — 2 of 5 fields, 1 signature — and what is still outstanding.
You type their name and their email address, and press send. One email leaves: your signature is requested, as the seller, on this document, for this order, at this address. One button, and nothing to install or accept.
"I'm fairly sure somebody sent it" is not a status.So the card keeps the score itself.
Asked Tuesday, to that address. The button turns into Resend. Open the card and every field they owe is a line of its own — the answer they gave, or Awaiting signature where they have not signed. When they finish, the card stops asking and names who finished it.
You cannot even send the request to somebody with nothing to sign. A party with no blanks on that document is refused a link, which sounds fussy until you have watched an office chase a signature nobody was ever asking for.
And once there is a signature to hang it on, every send and every resend is written into the signing record. So the file shows when they were asked, not only when they answered.
The awkward row isn't the person who hasn't signed. It's the person nobody asked.That row used to live in somebody's head, alongside four other people's rows, on a Thursday.
"Who are we still waiting on" stopped being a question you answer with a phone call. It is a line on a screen now, and it has a date on it.
Next: the four lines on an estoppel that say nothing happened.