Resend a Signature Request Without Confusing Signers
A signature request that stalls is routine. The wrong fix doubles the problem: two live copies of one deal, and a signer who no longer knows which link is real.
A deal that was verbal five minutes ago sits unsigned for an hour, then a day. The problem is rarely the stall itself; it is how dealers respond to it. Resend the wrong way and you turn one pending contract into two live copies, and a signer who no longer knows which one counts. Done right, resending is one of the simplest moves in the workflow. The whole trick is keeping a single source of truth from draft to signature.
Resend to the same request, not a brand new one
Every deal you lock has one identity: a reference number, a single contract, and one audit trail that timestamps each action. When a request stalls, the instinct is to open a fresh draft and send that instead. Resist it. A second draft means a second reference number, a second audit trail, and a signer staring at two links with no way to tell which one is the real deal.
The clean move is to resend the existing request so the signer lands back on the same contract. Because lockd delivers the agreement as a link, re-sharing that link is usually all it takes. The link resolves to the same item, the same price, and the same reference for ninety days, so a signer who lost the message in a busy thread can reopen the original without you rebuilding anything.
Different platforms handle this differently, and the differences matter. Some reset the expiration clock when you resend, which buys the signer more time on the same request. Others have no resend action at all: you cancel the outstanding request and start a new one, which is exactly the path that produces duplicates if you are not careful. Knowing which behavior your tool has tells you whether a resend is safe or whether you are quietly creating a second copy.
The point of a binding PDF is that one document holds. Two drafts of the same handshake undercut that. If a signer ever has to ask which contract to sign, you have already lost the clarity the signature was supposed to create.
Resend versus reminder: pick by what went wrong
Before you resend anything, diagnose why the request is sitting. The two common causes need opposite responses.
If the signer received the link and simply has not acted, send a reminder, not a new copy. A reminder is a nudge against the request that already exists. It keeps one live contract in play and avoids the question of which link to open. Most of the time a stalled deal is a busy person, not a broken link, and a short reminder closes it.
If the link never arrived, resend it. A wrong number, a typo in the email, a message buried under a day of chat, or a spam filter all mean the signer never saw the contract in the first place. Here a resend is correct, and if the contact detail was wrong, fix it before you send again so the second attempt actually reaches them.
- Reminder: the signer has the link and is stalling. Nudge the existing request.
- Resend: the link never landed. Re-share the same link, correcting the contact if needed.
- New deal: the terms themselves changed. Only then start fresh, and cancel the old one.
That third case is the one that bites. Sometimes a deal stalls because the terms moved: the price shifted, the item changed, a clause got added. A reminder or a resend would push an outdated contract, so you do need a new draft. The discipline is to retire the old one at the same time. Cancel the stale request so it cannot be signed, then issue the corrected deal with its own reference. One deal, one binding document, no ambiguity about which version holds.
Before you ever create a second request, check your dashboard for the first. The existing deal, its status, and its reference are right there. If it is still live and the terms are unchanged, resend or remind against it. If it genuinely needs replacing, cancel and reissue. The audit trail then reads as one clean story: drafted, sent, signed, finalized, with no orphaned copy sitting in a signer's phone waiting to confuse everyone a month later.
Keeping to that rule protects both sides. You keep a single source of truth in your dashboard, and your counterparty keeps one link that always points to the agreement they actually made. When the deal finally closes, there is exactly one signed PDF with one reference number, which is the whole point of locking it down in the first place.