Sequential, parallel and conditional signing explained

Routing is the part of e-signature software people get wrong first, because the default is almost never what the agreement actually needs.

Most agreements involve more than one person, and the order they act in is a business decision that the software then has to enforce.

Parallel

Everyone is asked at the same time. Use it when the signatures are independent — a mutual NDA between two parties who have both already agreed the wording, a policy acknowledgement going to forty employees.

It is faster, and the failure mode is mild: somebody signs a document a colleague later wants changed.

Sequential

Each person is asked only once the person before them has finished. Use it when a later signature depends on an earlier one — an internal approval before a document reaches a customer, a counter-signature after the client signs.

The important property is that nobody downstream can see or act on the document until their turn. If a system merely orders the emails but lets a later signer act early, it is not sequential routing, it is a scheduling preference.

Conditional

Some people only need to act depending on what an earlier person filled in. A contract over a threshold needs finance to approve it; under the threshold, it does not.

This is where routing gets genuinely difficult, and there are three rules worth holding to.

The condition reads a field somebody fills in earlier. Not a field the same person fills in, and not one filled in later — a rule that depends on its own outcome is not a rule.

It is evaluated at send, against every comparison in it. Checking only the first comparison of a rule with three is a bug that produces correct behaviour most of the time, which is the worst kind.

Whether somebody had to act must never depend on who opened their email first. If two parallel recipients can both satisfy a condition in different ways, the answer to "was finance required?" becomes a race. That is not an answer anyone can defend later.

Keep rules explainable

A certificate of completion is read by somebody working out why a reviewer was skipped. (a and b) or (c and not d) is a program, not a sentence, and nobody reading it under pressure will be confident they understood it.

A sensible limit is one comparison, or one flat group joined by all or any. Anything more nested belongs in a workflow engine, where it can be named, versioned and traced — not embedded invisibly in a routing rule.

What must happen when it ends badly

Routing is also responsible for what happens when an agreement ends without being signed — cancelled, declined, or lapsed. Everybody who was asked to act should be told.

Somebody holding a task that no longer exists is not a small discourtesy. It is the exact failure the product exists to prevent, and it is trivially easy to build a system that chases a signer for a document that was cancelled an hour earlier, because the reminder was already queued.

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.