Setting document access and visibility in the workflow

In the workflow you can control how recipients access each document or field, ensuring they see only what they need for their role. By setting access types like Fill, View, Hide, Conditional Fill, or Conditional View, you can customize document visibility and level of access to meet workflow requirements. This helps streamline tasks, improve security, and guide participants through the workflow more effectively.

To control document or field visibility in a workflow, you can set access at either the workflow step level or for the document overall:

Workflow Step Settings: Go to the settings of a specific workflow step and select an access type, which controls visibility and interaction for that particular step.

General Document Settings: Set visibility for the document as a whole, ideal when you need to hide a document from all participants (such as using it as a technical document). To modify these settings, click the desired document, go to the Visibility section, and select between "Always Visible," "Visible When Conditions Are Met," or "Hidden."

Each access type provides a different level of control over document visibility and recipient interaction:

The recipient has full access to view and fill out the assigned fields in the document.

Use case example:
Imagine a workflow for onboarding new employees. There are several documents, such as an offer letter, tax forms, and a benefits enrollment form. you assign Fill access to the HR manager for the tax forms. They need to review and complete the fields based on the employee’s details (such as their salary and deductions). The HR manager can view and fill out the form, ensuring that all fields are correctly populated before submitting the workflow.

The recipient can only view the document but cannot fill out any fields.

Use case example:
Consider a loan approval process where a credit officer fills out a loan application form, but the bank’s legal team only needs to verify the document. For this, you set the legal team’s access to View. This allows them to see the document without making any changes, ensuring that they can review it for compliance but not alter any critical information.

The document remains completely hidden from the recipient, with no access to view or interact with it, making it ideal for restricting sensitive information to specific participants in a workflow.

Use case example:
In a multi-step procurement workflow, there’s an internal budget review form that only the finance team should see. The procurement manager and the vendor should not have access to this document, so you set their access to Hide. This keeps the document hidden from those participants, ensuring that sensitive financial data remains confidential within the finance team.

This option allows recipients to fill out a document only when certain conditions are met. It ensures that users access and complete specific documents based on predefined criteria, displaying only relevant forms when necessary.

Use case example:
For a healthcare insurance claim, a form for additional medical reports only appears if the claimant's expenses exceed a set amount. When the claimant enters a larger amount, the system shows the additional report form, allowing it to be filled.

The option allows you to display a document to signers in read-only mode only when specific conditions are met. This ensures that recipients only view relevant documents based on criteria set in the workflow, helping to keep the process focused and streamlined.

Use case example:

In a legal contract negotiation workflow, there is an appendix that only needs to be reviewed if the contract’s value exceeds $100,000. With Conditional View, this appendix document is shown to the legal team only when the contract amount meets the condition. This ensures that recipients don’t get distracted by irrelevant documents unless they meet specific criteria, keeping the focus on necessary information.

For some complex cases, it’s important to understand how conditional documents are made available to recipients, and how the data from them is processed.

Case 1

Let’s say you have a workflow with two documents in it, and the second one is opened for filling out based on some conditions (1). If a user satisfies the conditions that open the second doc and starts completing it, the data in this document is saved (2), even if the user comes back to the first document and makes changes that disable their access to the second document (3).

Case 2

Let’s say you have a workflow that has three documents, with the second and the third ones being sequentially conditional, i.e. the second document is shown only if conditions are met in the first one, and the third document is shown only if conditions are met in the second one (1).

Once a user satisfies the conditions that open the second doc and starts completing it (2), they may consequently satisfy the conditions that open the third document (3). In this case, if they go back to the first document and change any data that will hide the second document, the third document stays available and will not become hidden (4).

To avoid this, it’s best to set up conditions for the third document to include both the first and the second document.