Learn How To Setup DocuSign Account Settings 7-Step Best Practice Guide [VIDEO TUTORIAL]

 

Whether you’ve just signed for your new digital signature software or have already been using it for some time, this step by step guide will help you learn “How to set up your DocuSign” account in the best possible way. We could spend hours talking about the DocuSign Account Setup page, also called DocuSign Admin page, but today we’ll just learn the most important things you want to have set up before you get started. That includes setting up your users and their permissions, adding your branding, selecting the right time zone, and a couple of other useful parameters.

 

Accessing DocuSign eSignature Admin

To access the Admin settings from the Homepage, Click on the Silhouette at the top right corner. 

 

1. Timezone

• Let’s start by setting up your account with the right timezone.
• Click on Regional settings, select your timezone and the date & time format of your choice. 

Note: the date format here relates to the way the date & time will appear on the DocuSign interface and not on the actual documents. You can set different formatting of the way the date will appear on documents in another setting that we’ll cover a bit further.

 

2. Branding

This page allows you to add your logo to the envelopes.

• Click on Brands and Add Brand
• Enter the name of your brand
• Then, Select Set assign default and Create your theme. On this page, you can see that you can upload two different logos: the signing logo and the email logo.

The signing logo is the one that will appear at the top right corner of the screen of your recipients during the signing process. I recommend uploading a high-quality logo and the size doesn’t really matter because DocuSign will resize automatically but it has to be less than 300Kb.

The email logo will appear in the email that your recipients will receive. Make sure the one you’re uploading isn’t too large because DocuSign won’t automatically resize it. I recommend using a logo of 296 by 76 pixels. It’s a good idea to send yourself a test envelope before you go live to double-check that the result looks exactly as you want.

• Finally, you also might want to change the default color theme that DocuSign already got in place. To do that, just by clicking on the colors you want to change and enter your color number or use the eyedropper to choose a color from the logo you’ve uploaded.

3. User(s) and Groups

A. Permission Profiles

Your DocuSign account comes with 3 different types of permissions: DS Admin, DS Sender, and DS Viewer.  By default, only administrators can create DocuSign templates. While I recommend you have at least two admins, you should be keeping the number of administrators to a minimum, for security reasons. For that same reason, you might want to allow your non-admin users to create, use, and share templates. You will find below how to create a custom permission profile.

1. Click on Add permission profile
2. Give it a name Sender + Templates for example
3. Then, Click on the dropdown from the Template menu
4. Select Share, this will allow you, users, to create, use, and share the templates they’ve created. You will now be able to assign this permission profile to your new users when setting them up and update existing ones.

B. Groups

If you are setting up multiple users, the best practice is to Create user groups, which will help you manage your users and their permissions quicker.

• From the left menu, click on Groups.
• Then, Add as many Groups as you’d like.

Note: A user can only be allocated to one group.

 

C. Users

You can either set up new users one by one by:

• Selecting New user and following the steps or,
• If you’ve got quite a few accounts to set up, choose Bulk actions > Add users, then click on sample file to download a CSV template.
• Once you’ve added your users to the template, return to the DocuSign admin page and click on Upload CSV file and locate the CSV.

4. Signing Settings

To improve the signing experience when using DocuSign on a mobile device, make sure that the box “Allow recipients to view mobile-friendly documents with responsive signing” is checked.

• Choose the Date and time format that you want to appear on your documents
• Make sure that the box “Attach documents to completion email” is checked so that DocuSign will automatically email all recipients a PDF copy of all agreements once finalized.

5. Email Preferences

By default, DocuSign will email you for anything that happens on the account or an envelope you sent. Untick any event you don’t want to be notified about.

Note: Users can override their own Email Preferences on their My Preferences page.

 

6. Reminders and Expiration

If you want DocuSign to remind your recipients to sign an envelope you sent them, turn on the option.

• The First value relates to the number of days you want DocuSign to wait before sending the first reminder out.
• The Second value is related to the number of days you want DocuSign to wait for each reminder.
• If you Select 0, your recipients will receive a reminder every day, until they sign.
• If you Select 1, DocuSign reminds your recipients every second day.
• If you’re tempted to update the Envelope expiration settings, be careful. Once an envelope has expired, you’ll need to resend it, which will cost you a new envelope.

7. User-level Settings

From the Home page, Click on the Silhouette and select My Preferences.

 

Personal Information

If you’ve got one, adding your professional photo can give a more professional and personalized look to your envelopes. Add your position title and company if you haven’t done so when setting up the user profile and signature. You can choose from a selection of signatures and also upload one if you’ve got one saved as an image. If you want to draw one, you’ll get a better result by using your fingertips rather than your hand, so I recommend downloading the DocuSign mobile app.

 

Privacy and Security

In case you want to increase security by adding a second-factor authentication.

 

Notifications

Turn on/off any events you do or don’t want to receive an email notification for. Your DocuSign account is now correctly set up! You’re off to a great start, but don’t stop there: the next step is to learn, How to set up send your first DocuSign envelope!