What is waiting for my signature, and what did we send this customer?

Documents are where business questions go to hide. The answer to “did they sign?” is in an email thread, “what did we agree?” is in an attachment, and “is this figure current?” is in a spreadsheet exported in March. Rutba Sign and Rutba Workspace were built so those answers live on records instead — which is also what lets an assistant find them.

“What is waiting for my signature?”

GET /sign/inbox

A director between meetings. One call reads what waits for the signed-in person across every live envelope in the organization — so the answer is “three agreements are waiting for you, the oldest sent on Tuesday”, and a link to each. It is the director’s own inbox because it is the director who asked; the assistant has no inbox of its own to read instead.

“What have we sent this customer, and where does each stand?”

An account manager preparing for a renewal meeting. Envelopes in Rutba Sign remember the record they were raised from, so the assistant can ask for everything sent from one customer’s record, then read each envelope’s evidence ledger and its negotiation thread:

GET /sign/envelopes?sourceUid={recordType}&sourceDocumentId={customer}
GET /sign/envelopes/{envelope}/events
GET /sign/envelopes/{envelope}/comments

Each envelope’s evidence ledger is the chain of events that proves who viewed and who signed, in order, so “signed by both parties, sealed on the fourth” is the ledger talking rather than somebody’s note. The thread adds what was argued about before signing, which is usually what the renewal meeting is going to be about. Why that ledger is the product rather than the signature is the subject of the signature is the easy part.

“Do we need a stamp or a notary in their country?”

GET /sign/formalities/guide?country={country}
GET /sign/packs?country={country}

The formalities guide says which stamp, seal and notary formalities a country’s rules offer and which of them can be done electronically — for the countries whose rules have been reviewed. The pack library says which ready-made agreements exist for that country. The assistant answers from those two, and where a country has not been reviewed it says so rather than guessing at another country’s law. How the formalities themselves are arranged is in stamps, seals and notaries, arranged at cost.

“Are the figures in this document still current?”

GET /workspace/documents/{document}/bindings
GET /workspace/bindings/queries

A Workspace document can bind a range to a business query, so a figure in a board paper is a live read rather than a pasted number. The first call reads what the bindings say now, resolved for the person asking — so a reader only ever sees what their own access returns. The second says which queries this person could bind, and what blocks the rest. It is the argument of the spreadsheet was true the day it was exported, applied to the question “can I trust this number?”.

Where it hands back to a person

• Signing. A signature is evidence that a particular person acted. The assistant reads the ceremony’s record; it takes no part in one.
• Sending an agreement. An envelope reaches somebody outside the business in your name, which makes sending yours.
• Changing what a document binds. Binding a range to a query is authoring, done by somebody who can edit the document and could run the query themselves.