Document signing for small teams without an IT department

Each designer has their own DocuSign trial. Templates in five Dropbox folders. 'I think Kari sent it.' Nobody knows what is signed. That is not a tool problem. It is an ownership problem in front of a tool.

IT's answer is IAM. You do not have IT. Your answer is boring: one channel out, one folder in, a Friday tidy.

Enterprise sales will save you with admin. Admin with nobody administering is a locked cupboard.

A shared Gmail hello@ as sender can be fine. A shared Gmail that is also someone's private love thread is not. Separate them.

Ordinary contracts: SES, a link, counterparty with no account. Exception: BankID/QES when the client or the law requires it — and then a separate track, not 'maybe in the same tool if we tick a box somewhere'.

Write it in Notion or on a sheet. New people read three lines. They do not read a 12-page procurement note.

If you already pay for Adobe because of layout, do not force Acrobat Sign in 'since we have Adobe'. Different jobs. Different buttons.

Backup: download finished PDFs to a place that survives the tool dying. The wall is not your only memory.

One sender identity. Everyone else gets a link when they must tag, or they are cc. A licence for everyone 'just in case' is how the seat eats the margin.

Google login is fine if you already live there. A magic link to email is fine if not. The other person's account is almost never fine.

When someone leaves: download the archive that week, not 'later'. Later is when the password sat in their private Gmail.

Say in onboarding: we mark PDFs like this, exceptions look like this. Three lines. Otherwise new people guess DocuSign because that was the last job.

One screen: waiting, done, dropped. Friday: kill ghosts. One nudge, then a phone call. No 'we have an automation' that you do not have.

Sequence only when needed. Parallel otherwise. Small teams love over-designing flows because it feels like control. Control is a finished file in the folder.

Decline and void are hygiene. See the other article, and do it. The list lies if you do not.

Read where the files live. Do not promise eternal deletion you cannot keep. Ads on the wall: say the PDF is not the banner. If the client is a municipality with a portal, use the portal. You will not win that fight with an Oslo wall.

Do not fill a 40-page SIG if you are four people and the question is an NDA. Either say no to that client, or pay a seat at someone who has a SIG. The middle is lying on a form.

Crypto PAdES against a house CA: honest integrity, yellow in Acrobat. Practise the sentence. It saves Tuesdays.

When five departments send, when an API into finance, when an auditor asks for a vendor list. Then the seat and SSO are a real cost, not a boast.

Switch on purpose, not in a panic after a lost file. Bring the PDF archive. Field templates are glue; the documents are the gold.

Until then: one track, SES, a link, tidying. That is a team, not a platform.

Interns should not own the sender account. They can get links to tag. Admin for everyone is how a severance letter goes to the wrong human on a Thursday.

A shared password on a Notion page is not IAM. It is a forum post waiting to leak. One login, a downloaded archive, done.

When you become eight people, that is still not an IT department. It is eight people. Do not buy SCIM because the word feels adult. Buy it when someone actually provisions accounts every week.

When someone asks about ISO and a pentest, answer with volume and honesty, not with an invented yes. Either you have it, or you point at a seat at someone who has it, or that client is the wrong client. A lie on a form is more expensive than lost revenue on one municipality.

Rotation: the person who owns the list should have a deputy. Illness is not an argument for shared passwords in Slack. It is an argument for two humans who can download the archive.