Signer Annotations

By default, signers can do more than just add required signatures in their documents - in fact, they can fill out the entire document within Prof if they wanted. Such additions of content are known as signer annotations.

When you outsource notarization, however, sometimes mistakes happen. For example, a signer may add an "N/A" to a line that is meant to be left blank. Someone processing the completed document may require certain fields to be left blank for the document to be considered valid.

Thankfully, you have a variety of options to prevent signer annotations on documents and ensure downstream requirements are met. You can prevent signer annotations at the document level, transaction level, key level, and organization level.

NOTE: if you prevent signer annotations, it is required that you tag your document so that our platform knows how to consider the document "complete".

Signer Annotation Settings at the Document Level

When you create a transaction via API, you can set customer_can_annotate in the document object to false:

POST /transactions
{
  "signers": [
    {
      "email": "[email protected]"
    }
  ],
  "documents": [
      {
          "resource": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf",
          "customer_can_annotate": false
      }
  ]
}

At the Transaction Level

When you create a transaction via API, you can set signer annotation settings for all documents in the transaction level using the allow_signer_annotations parameter in the transaction object:

POST /transactions
{
  "signers": [
    {
      "email": "[email protected]"
    }
  ],
  "documents": [
      {
          "resource": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf"
      }
  ],
  "allow_signer_annotations": false
}

At the API Key Level

In your API Key Settings, you can lock the allow_signer_annotations parameter of the transaction object for all transactions created with that API key.

You can override this setting for a given document by setting customer_can_annotate on a document (see above).

At the Organization Level

In your account settings, you can lock allow_signer_annotations for all transactions created within your organization. You can find this by clicking your name in the upper right >> Transaction Settings >> Signer Can Edit Document by Default.

You can override this setting for a given document by setting customer_can_annotate on a document (see above).