What each envelope status means
Your document list shows one of these:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Uploaded, not yet prepared. Nothing has been sent. |
| Ready to send | Fields are placed and recipients are set. Still not sent. |
| Sent | The envelope left draft and is waiting on signatures. See the caveat below — this does not by itself prove an invitation reached anyone. |
| In progress | At least one recipient has signed, others are still outstanding. |
| Completed | Everyone signed. The sealed PDF and certificate are available. |
| Changes requested | A signer asked for edits. The envelope is closed and can't be signed; review their reason and pinned comments, then revise and resend it as a new envelope. |
| Declined | A recipient refused to sign. The envelope is closed and cannot be reopened. |
| Voided | You cancelled it before completion. |
| Expired | It passed its 30-day deadline without completing. |
Declined means a signer actively chose not to sign — it is not an error or delivery failure. The envelope is finished; to continue, send a new one.
On the signing page, the signer can refuse or request changes. A change request includes a required reason and may include comments pinned to pages, fields, or selected text. You receive a notification; open the envelope to review the comments and use Revise & resend. Field comments name the field (its label, or its type such as "Signature field"). Revise & resend opens a draft copy marked "Revision of <envelope>"; if you leave and come back, the button reads Open revision and reopens the same draft instead of making another copy. Once the revision is sent, the original shows View revision and the documents list marks the new envelope "Revision". The revised envelope keeps the original envelope available in its audit trail. The first qualifying revision is free; later revisions are charged normally.
A refusal can include an optional reason (up to 1000 characters). If given, it appears in the envelope's activity timeline and audit trail, and as reason with mode: "refuse" in the document.declined webhook. A change request emits document.changes_requested and document.declined with mode: "changes"; the request reason and pinned comments are included.
Two older statuses, Cancelled and Deleted, appear only on envelopes created before those states were split out. Nothing new is ever put in them.
"Sent" does not guarantee an email arrived. It means the envelope was created and signing links exist. Two cases produce a "Sent" envelope where no invitation was delivered:
- You sent it with
send_invite: false. zSign deliberately emails nobody; you are delivering the signing links yourself. This is the normal setup for embedded and API integrations. - The invitation failed to send. If the email dispatch throws, zSign logs the failure and leaves the envelope in Sent rather than rolling it back.
So if a signer says nothing arrived, do not assume it must have. Check whether the envelope was sent with invitations suppressed, and see article 5.
If you use the API: the wire value for the "Sent" badge is pending. An envelope with "status": "pending" is waiting on signatures — it is not stuck in a queue.