why Recipient Action "Acknowledge Receipt" cannot Approve/Decline in Docusign

Question

I am new to Docusign and have one understanding question about Tags visibility for "Recipient Action"

For example, if i have a recipient as "Signer" I can set tags on the document.

however If i have a recipient as "Acknowledge Recipient" I am not able to set any tags.

The reason is i want to set a user who Acknowledge the document and approve/decline the submitted document.

Is there a way to enable to tags to other Action type as well or I have to keep those recipients as "Signer" as well?

Appreciate your help.

Nitza

Answer 1

A recipient with Type = "Acknowledge Receipt" cannot have any tags. Using this recipient type in an Envelope workflow simply means that the recipient designated as Type = "Acknowledge Receipt" must open/view the Envelope before the Envelope will be routed to the next recipient in the Envelope's workflow (or move to "Completed" status, if the AR recipient is the final recipient in the workflow).

If you want a recipient to Approve / Decline the Envelope using buttons within the document, then you'd use recipient Type = "Signer" and only add the Approve tag and Decline tag for that recipient. (Contrary to how it may sound, a "Signer" recipient type in DocuSign simply means that the recipient has one or more tags assigned to them within the Envelope -- they don't actually have to be "Signing" the document, unless of course, one or more of their tags are SignHere tags.)

Markson

Ohh Okay. I was distracted with the name "Acknowledge Receipt". With this can i also ask a question. The only way to set a Recipient status to "Completed/Declined" is go through docusign link from the EMAIL? Is there no way to achieve it through API? The use case i am falling under needs to complete the document through API. Thanks for your inputs though. I appreciate your time. – Nitza

Technically, only a recipient's action can cause an envelope to become either "Completed" or "Declined" -- you can't complete or decline an Envelope with an API call. One caveat/trick though -- you can cause an Envelope to become Complete if you use the API to Delete any remaining recipient(s) in the workflow (provided that at least 1 recipient has already completed their required actions). When you delete remaining recipients, the Envelope will complete. Also, if you want to "kill" an in-process Envelope such that no further action can be taken upon it, you can Void it with an API call. – Markson