Recording an Agreement Signed on Paper

Who this is for

You drafted an agreement in keysig, but everyone signed a printed copy in pen instead of by email, and you want keysig to hold the signed copy and show the agreement as Signed.

Marking an agreement signed on paper

Any agreement in your account that is not yet signed can be marked as signed on paper, as long as it names at least two parties and every party has an email address. That is the same rule as sending: keysig has to know who signed, and it emails each of them.

1. Open the agreement and choose Signed on paper under Actions.
2. Upload the scanned PDF of the signed copy. It has to be a PDF, up to 20 MB, and not password protected.
3. Enter the date it was signed, then choose Mark as signed.

What happens next: keysig stores a copy of the PDF as the final signed copy (see below for how it is made) and marks the agreement Signed, with every party recorded as signed on that date. The agreement page and the activity list say it was recorded as signed on paper, not signed by all parties, and the same words appear for anyone the agreement is shared with. Every other party gets an email saying you recorded it, with the date, that keysig holds no e-signature record for it, and where to write if that is not what happened. If a signing request was still out by email, keysig takes it back once it has accepted your file, so the emailed links stop working, and the credit that send used comes back; if the file is refused, the request stays out. Recording a paper signing uses no credit.

Before you do it

• A signed agreement cannot be edited afterwards, so make sure the copy you upload is the final version, signed by everyone. To build on it later, use Duplicate & edit.
• The PDF you upload is the record. keysig checks that the file is a PDF, but it does not read what the document says, and there is no e-signature record behind it, because nobody signed electronically. Keep the paper original.
• Because every other party can open the stored copy, keysig does not keep your file byte for byte. It copies the pages into a new PDF without anything that could run on the reader's computer: scripts, actions that run on their own, attached files, embedded media, and links that open a file or a program instead of a web page. The pages themselves, including signatures added in a PDF app, come across unchanged. If anything was taken out, keysig tells you when it marks the agreement Signed. Bookmarks and fillable form fields do not carry over, and a digital signature inside the file stops checking out, because the stored copy is a new file.
• If a party is missing a name or an email address, keysig refuses and tells you which to add under Edit details.
• In any 24 hours, keysig sends at most a hundred of these emails for one account, and at most ten to any one address, counting every account together. An agreement filed under a label is not counted. An upload that would go past either is refused with nothing recorded, and any signing request that was out stays out. Try again the next day, or write to hello@keysig.co.
• Download signed PDF on the agreement page gives you back that stored copy, free, every time.
• If the agreement states who owns what, its ownership records update, but they stay provisional: keysig collected no signatures for them, so the track's ownership panel lists them apart from e-signed splits, the label catalog counts them as provisional, and the ownership exports mark those rows Provisional = Yes with On paper in their Execution column. Nothing turns them into settled ownership except signing the agreement electronically. See Signed agreements and records.

If something goes wrong: if the upload fails, check the file is a PDF and try again. If keysig says the PDF is locked, cannot be read, or came out over 25 MB when it was rebuilt, print it to a new PDF (or scan it at a lower resolution) and upload that copy; if the agreement still shows as a draft afterwards, see Troubleshooting.