Envelope

The container for one signing transaction: its documents, its people, its fields and its order.

An envelope is one signing transaction. It holds one or more documents, the recipients who must act on them, the fields each recipient has to complete, and the order they are asked in.

It is also, in most products, the billing unit: you pay per envelope sent, not per signature collected or per document stored. An envelope sent to five people is one envelope.

Once an envelope is sent, its document versions should become immutable. A version that could still be edited after sending would make every signature on it meaningless — so freezing at send is not an implementation detail, it is what the signature refers to.

An envelope has a lifecycle — draft, sent, completed, declined, cancelled, expired — and the endings matter as much as the completion. When one ends without being signed, everybody who was asked to act should be told.

Last reviewed 2026-09-18. Pactlyra produces a detailed evidence record for every completed document. Electronic signature validity depends on your jurisdiction, the document type, and how the transaction is carried out; nothing here is legal advice.