Generate Documents - Smartsheet / DocuSign integration won't let me put fields into PDF

Nathan Merrill

We are trying to create documents that customers can sign electronically and return to us. We want to be able to do this totally online, if possible, as some of our customers live out in remote rural areas and having them spend hours driving into town to sign physical paper documents can be a hardship on them.

DocuSign seemed like it would be a fairly ideal solution to this, particularly with its integration with Smartsheet.

However, when we try to Smartsheet to generate documents, the fillable PDF forms we have can't have fields assigned to their fillable fields. Trying to drag and drop the cell data into the PDF form simply does not work in Smartsheet's Generate Documents function when we try to do the E-Sign thing.

The thing is, these same fillable PDFs work just fine when we create a document and just try to create a fillable PDF that we then print off; we can drag and drop the fields into the fillable PDF document and then they'll show up in the appropriate places and everything works.

As such, the issue is specifically with the ESign generate documents function, and not the PDF generate documents function.

Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing some sort of option here? Or does it just not work?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Nathan Merrill

If you're looking to send out a DocuSign document, then the first thing to check is that the file you're mapping against is a DocuSign template. (See point 4, here: Create and Edit a DocuSign Mapping).

Then since it works directly in Smartsheet but not when you connect to DocuSign, the next thing to check is your permission level in DocuSign. In DocuSign, you must be able to Allow users to send envelopes and Create templates. (See the note under "Capabilities" in the article above).

Here's more information on DocuSign permissions.

Let me know if this was the issue!

Cheers,

Genevieve