What reaches this screen, and what never does
The list is assembled by exclusion first. Before anything is shown, three filters run.
- Deleted documents are dropped.
- Anything typed as a Brief is dropped, because briefs belong to a different workflow and would only clutter a signing queue.
- Anything still in Draft is dropped. This is the important one: an agency can build a contract in stages without any risk of a client seeing a half-written version.
What survives is then matched to the person looking at it, and the matching is deliberately generous. A document is yours if it is linked to your user record, or your email is the client email on it, or your email is in the recipient list, or your email is on the signatory list. That breadth matters in practice, because agencies address documents inconsistently — sometimes to a company contact, sometimes to a named individual — and a strict match on one field would hide paperwork from the person who needs it.
The three counters at the top
Three numbers sit above the list, and they are chosen well: one for scale, one for urgency, one for reassurance.
- Total Documents — everything visible to you after the filters above. Context, not a task.
- Awaiting Signature — the count still in the sent state. This is the only number that represents work.
- Signed / Approved — the two settled states counted together, because from a client’s side there is no useful difference between a document that was signed and one that was approved.
Combining Signed and Approved into one figure is the kind of decision that keeps a client screen readable. Splitting them would create a distinction the client cannot act on.
Four statuses, and the one that gets renamed
The portal does not simply mirror the agency’s vocabulary. One status is translated on the way through.
| Agency status | Shown to client as | Colour | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sent | Awaiting Signature | Amber | The rename is the point. An agency thinks in terms of having sent something; a client needs to know something is waiting on them. |
| Signed | Signed | Emerald | Executed. No further action from anyone. |
| Approved | Approved | Blue | Accepted without a signature being the mechanism. Counted alongside Signed in the summary numbers. |
| Draft | Never shown | — | Drafts are filtered out before the list is built, so unfinished paperwork cannot leak into a client view. |
“Sent” is a description of what the agency did. “Awaiting Signature” is a description of what the client needs to do. Same record, and a materially different reading experience. If you are designing any client-facing status vocabulary, that translation is the pattern to copy.
Anatomy of the signature progress panel
This is the centre of the module. When a document has named signatories, its card grows a small panel that answers the whose-turn-is-it question completely.
The panel has two layers.
The count comes first: how many signatories have signed, out of how many there are. Two of four is a fundamentally different situation from three of four, and a client looking at a stalled contract can tell in one glance whether it is nearly done or barely started.
Below it sit the chips, one per signatory. Each chip carries that person’s state, derived by matching their email against the signatures actually recorded on the document. And the chip belonging to the person viewing the screen is explicitly marked as theirs.
That last detail is small and does a lot of work. On a document with a company signatory, a legal reviewer, and two agency names, finding your own row is otherwise a careful read of four email addresses. The marker turns it into a glance. It also removes the most common e-signature confusion of all, which is signing something you already signed because you could not remember.
Because state is derived from recorded signatures rather than stored as a flag, the panel cannot drift out of step with reality. If a signature exists, the chip shows it.
Why Sign Now is sometimes missing
Two conditions gate the signing action, and both are worth understanding because their absence is not a bug.
- The document has to be awaiting signature. A signed or approved document is finished, so no signing action is offered.
- Your email has to be on the signatory list. If the document names its signatories and you are not one of them, you can read it and you cannot execute it.
This is the correct default for anyone who has watched a project manager sign a contract they had no authority to sign. Read access and signing authority are different permissions, and Arpixa keeps them apart. Where a document names no signatories at all, the signing action is available to the recipient, which covers the simple one-party case without ceremony.
If you should be a signatory and are not, that is an agency-side change: they add your address to the document. The agency-side view of the same workflow is described in E-Sign Docs.
Where View Document and Sign Now lead
Both actions open the document’s own shareable page in a new browser tab. The difference is only that Sign Now arrives with signing already engaged, and View Document does not.
Opening in a new tab rather than a modal is a deliberate call. A contract is a document you read properly, possibly at length, possibly while checking something else. A cramped overlay inside a dashboard encourages skimming, which is the last behaviour you want before a signature.
There is also a copy-link action on the card, which puts the same document URL on your clipboard. That is the honest solution to a real-world problem: the person who needs to read a contract is frequently not the person with portal access. Rather than pretending otherwise, the portal makes it easy to forward.
Where a document has no share link yet, both actions explain themselves instead of failing quietly — one tells you the preview is not available and to ask your agency, the other tells you the signing link is not ready. Both are things the agency fixes.
Stop chasing signatures over email
Start free in minutes, or log in to your Arpixa workspace. See pricing for plan details.
Signing is included rather than metered. Arpixa prices the whole workspace across four tiers — free, $12 a month, $29 a month, and $89 a month — and client capacity is what separates them. The pricing page has the specifics.
Type badges, and finding one document
Each card carries a type badge, and the vocabulary is short on purpose.
| Badge | What sits behind it |
|---|---|
| Contract | The default for agreements and statements of work. |
| NDA | Kept as its own type because it is usually the first thing signed and the first thing looked for later. |
| Proposal | A proposal routed through the document flow rather than the proposal flow. Live proposals live in their own module. |
| Document | The catch-all label, stored as Other. Anything that is not one of the above. |
Three controls narrow the list. A status switch offers All, Awaiting, and Signed, where Signed covers both settled states. A type selector filters to one badge. And a search box matches on the document’s details for when you know its name and nothing else.
For a client with two years of history across three agencies, the combination that matters is Awaiting on its own. Everything else is archaeology; that one is the to-do list.
How to sign a document
- Open Documents in the portal, or tap the amber banner if one is showing.
- Find the item marked Awaiting Signature, and check the signature panel to see whether anyone is ahead of you.
- Read it first using View Document, which opens the document in a new tab.
- Return and choose Sign Now, which opens the same document with signing already engaged.
- Complete the signature in that tab.
- Come back to Documents and confirm your chip in the signature panel has flipped to signed.
The last step is the one people skip and the one that saves the awkward follow-up. Checking that your chip has flipped is a two-second confirmation that the signature actually landed, rather than assuming it did because a tab closed. Proposals follow a different path with their own signing surface, covered in Proposals.
Frequently asked questions
What appears on the Documents screen in the Arpixa client portal?
Contracts, NDAs, and other documents an agency has sent to a client for signature or approval, across every connected agency. Two categories are deliberately excluded: anything still in Draft, and anything typed as a Brief. Everything remaining is matched to the viewer by several routes, including their user record, their email, the recipient list, and the signatory list.
Why does a document say Awaiting Signature when the agency sent it?
Because the portal relabels the agency-side status for the client. A document stored as Sent is displayed as Awaiting Signature in amber. It is the same record with a label written from the reader’s point of view, which is a small change that removes a genuine ambiguity about whose turn it is.
How does the signature progress panel work?
When a document has named signatories, the card shows a progress panel with a count of how many of them have signed out of the total, plus one chip per signatory. Each chip shows whether that person has signed, and your own chip is marked so you can find yourself instantly in a list of five names.
Why can I see a document but not sign it?
Two conditions have to hold before the Sign Now action appears. The document has to be awaiting signature, and your email address has to be on its signatory list. If you are a recipient but not a signatory, you get read access and no signing action, which is correct: being able to see a contract is not the same as being authorised to execute it.
Can several people sign the same document?
Yes. A document can carry multiple signatories, and the panel tracks them independently, showing a running count and a per-person state. Nothing is blocked while others are outstanding, so signing order does not have to be negotiated; the count simply climbs until it is complete.
Where does Sign Now actually take me?
To that document’s own shareable view in a new browser tab, with signing already engaged. View Document opens the same page without it. Both use the document’s share link, which is also why there is a copy-link action on the card for forwarding to a colleague who needs to read it.
What if a document has no share link yet?
The portal says so rather than failing silently. Attempting to view it explains that the preview is not available yet and to ask your agency to share it, and attempting to sign explains that the signing link is not ready and to contact your agency. Both are agency-side fixes, not client-side errors.
How do I find one document among many?
Three controls work together: a status switch of All, Awaiting, and Signed; a type selector covering contracts, NDAs, proposals, and general documents; and a search box. Awaiting is the one worth using most, because it reduces the screen to exactly the items that need you.