One document, hundreds of signers, each with their own copy.

What is bulk send for signature?

Bulk send lets you send one document to many people at once, with each person getting their own copy to sign and their own audit trail. It is the right tool when the document is identical for everyone and only the people signing it change: a policy update for all employees, a waiver for every volunteer, a consent form for every parent in a class.

Bulk send is live in eSignSimple. You can send up to 200 copies of a template in one go, each with one or more signers, and nobody has to create an account to sign.

How does bulk send work in eSignSimple?

Pick a template and add one line per copy you want to send, either pasted or as an uploaded CSV file. Each line holds a name and an email for every role in the template, in role order: a one-role template needs two columns (name, email), a template with Employee and Manager roles needs four. Up to 200 lines fit in a single send, and every line becomes its own document with its own signing links, following the template's signing order, so nobody sees anybody else's copy.

Before anything goes out, we clean the list. Invalid email addresses and duplicates are skipped, and we tell you exactly which rows were skipped and why. Each copy that is sent gets its own audit trail, certificate of completion and SHA-256 fingerprint, just like a document you sent by hand.

If no email provider is configured on your account setup, we do not pretend the emails went out. Instead you get the list of personal signing links so you can share them yourself, one per person.

How does bulk send count toward your plan?

Bulk send is part of Silver and Gold. Each copy is one document, and Silver ($9.99 a month) includes unlimited documents, so a send to 200 people is simply a send to 200 people. Every row is reported as sent or not sent, so you always know exactly who received the document.

Who is bulk send for, and when is it the wrong tool?

HR teams rolling out a handbook or policy change (see our HR page), schools collecting photo and trip consent with a photo release, nonprofits collecting volunteer waivers before an event, landlords sending a rules update to every tenant in a building, and companies asking contractors to sign an updated NDA.

It is not the right tool when each document is negotiated individually, such as sales contracts with custom pricing, where the wording itself differs from one signer to the next. For those, send individually from a template so each version is exactly right. Several signers per copy are fine, though: a two-role template lets each employee and their own manager sign the same copy, line by line.

How do you run a clean bulk send?

Export your list straight from the spreadsheet or HR tool you already use and keep it to two columns. Check the skipped-rows report after sending: a typo in an address is far easier to fix now than a week later when someone says they never received anything. For lists over 200, split them into batches.

How do competitors handle bulk send?

DocuSign offers Bulk Send, typically on its business-oriented plans, and Dropbox Sign, Adobe Acrobat Sign and PandaDoc have their own versions. They work well, but the feature is often reserved for higher tiers, and on envelope-based pricing a single bulk send to a few hundred people can use up a large share of a monthly or annual allowance.

Our take: charging per envelope turns bulk send into a budgeting exercise. We include it in Silver with unlimited documents, so there is no quota to check before you send a policy to your whole team.

What does a bulk send look like from start to finish?

Take a school with 180 parents who need to sign a photo consent form at the start of term. The office saves the form as a template with one role, Parent, a signature field, a date and a checkbox for "I agree to my child appearing in the school newsletter". They export the class lists from their school system into a spreadsheet, keep two columns (name and email) and save it as CSV.

They upload the file, and before anything is sent the page reports 176 valid rows and 4 problems by line number: 2 duplicates where a parent appears on two class lists, and 2 broken addresses (one missing the @, one with a space in the middle). The 176 copies go out, each parent gets their own email with their own link, and nothing on the problem list is sent. The office fixes the two typos and sends those two copies on their own.

Over the following week the dashboard fills up with completed copies. Parents who have not signed after 3 days get an automatic reminder, up to 3 times. By the end of the week the office knows exactly which families have not signed, without a single paper form going home in a schoolbag.

How should you format the CSV file?

For a one-role template, two columns: name first, email second. For more roles, repeat the name and email pair for each role in the template's order. A header row such as "name,email" is fine; a first line without an email address is treated as a header and skipped. Commas, semicolons and tabs all work as separators, so a semicolon-separated export from a European Excel is fine. Save as CSV UTF-8 so accented names like José or Ayşe come through correctly. Avoid commas inside names ("Smith, Jane"), because they split the line into extra columns. If you paste instead of uploading, put one copy per line in the same format: "Jane Smith, jane@example.com". Within one line, each role needs a different email address, or the line is reported as a problem.

The most common problems we see are not about the format but about the data: a column of phone numbers pasted where emails should be, addresses with a trailing space or a full stop at the end, and shared inboxes like office@ that several people read. Each copy is tied to one address, so if two people share an inbox, whoever opens the link first signs that copy. For lists over 200, split the file into batches of 200 or fewer and send each one.

What happens after a bulk send?

Each copy behaves like a normal document. It appears in your dashboard with its own status (sent, completed, declined or voided), its own audit trail and, once signed, its own certificate and SHA-256 fingerprint. If one person declines, only their copy is affected. If you need to withdraw the document from one person, void that single copy; everyone else's stays live.

Reminders run per copy too: every 3 days, at most 3 times, for anyone who has not signed. After that it is worth a personal nudge, since three unanswered emails usually means the address is wrong or the message is landing in a spam folder. When someone tells us they never received anything, the first thing to check is the address in the report, the second is their spam folder.

Can you send documents that are different for each person?

Not through bulk send. Every copy gets exactly the same document; only the signers' names and emails change. That is deliberate, because it keeps a bulk send predictable: what you previewed is what 200 people receive. If each person needs a different salary, address or rent amount in the body of the document, prepare and send those documents individually from a template, or have the signer type the varying detail into a text field when the detail is theirs to provide, such as an emergency contact.

If you are automating a large, personalised send, the API is the better tool: your system can generate each PDF with the right details and send it with one request per person. Our HR solutions page covers which HR documents suit bulk send and which need individual sends.

Who uses bulk send, and for what?