Signatures & e-sign

Signatures are a natural bottleneck in tax work: an engagement letter, a §7216 consent, an e-file authorization all have to be signed before things can move. Journey collects them electronically, so a signature is a link a client clicks rather than a PDF that gets printed, signed, scanned, and emailed back. That turns a multi-day round-trip into a few minutes.

How a client signs

A client sees the document in their portal, or through a secure link, reviews it, and signs it in place. They can type or draw their signature, and a document can require them to fill in fields (a name, a date, other blanks) before signing, so the finished document captures both their information and their consent.

Where signatures happen

There are two main moments signatures come up. The first is onboarding: your legal documents (engagement terms, privacy, §7216) are presented when a client first sets up their portal, and where you've enabled e-signature on a document, a real signature is captured; where you haven't, a click-to-agree acceptance is recorded instead. See Client portal. The second is on a return or request: staff can send a specific document for signature at any point, and it appears in the client's portal to sign.

Fillable fields

Legal document templates support tokens (the signature block, the date, your firm's legal name) as well as fields the client completes. This is what lets a single template serve every client: the template holds the fixed language, and the fillable fields and signature capture each client's specifics. You write the document once, and it adapts per client without a manual rewrite.

Audit trail

Every signature is recorded with an audit trail (who signed, when, and the signer's IP address), and it's kept in a staff-only record. The signed acceptance is stored against the specific version of the document that was signed, so you can always show exactly what a client agreed to and when, which is the point of an audit trail in the first place.

Signature status

Staff can see the state of every signature request (pending, signed, expired, or revoked) on the return or request and in the client's record. When a document is signed, the staff member who requested it is notified in the app.

Turning it on

You enable e-signature per legal document in Settings under Legal Documents. And because the exact wording matters, changing a document's content automatically creates a new version, so clients re-affirm the current terms rather than a stale copy.