Troubleshooting In-Person Signing

Most in-person signing sessions run start to finish without a hitch. When something stops you, it is almost always one of the situations below. Each one is a deliberate safeguard rather than a fault, and each clears in a few seconds.

"An In-Person Session Is Already in Progress"

Only one host can run a session on a document at a time. This message means someone else, or you on a different device, currently holds it.

What to do:

• Check whether a colleague is mid-session with the signer. If so, wait for them to finish.
• If it was you on another device or in a tab you closed, end the hand-off there and start again.
• If nobody is actually hosting, the hold releases on its own after about 15 minutes of inactivity. Try again after that.

The hold refreshes every time a session advances to the next signer, so a long multi-party session will never lapse mid-way while you are actively working through it.

The In-Person Option Is Not Available

In-person (host-led) signing is included on the Business plan. If you cannot set a recipient to sign in person, your workspace may be on a different plan, or an administrator may have turned the feature off for your organization.

See features not included in your plan for how to check what your workspace covers.

You Are Asked for the Signer's Name and Email

A hand-off cannot start without both. Even where you left the recipient blank while preparing the document, the details have to be captured before the signer's view opens.

This is not bureaucracy. The email address identifies that signer on the document and is where their signed copy is delivered once everything is complete. Enter both while the signer is with you so you can confirm the address is right.

"Another Signer Already Uses This Email"

Two people on the same document cannot share an email address. If the address you typed already belongs to another recipient, Inkfree stops the hand-off rather than accepting it.

What to do:

• Check for a typo that has accidentally matched another signer's address.
• If the same person genuinely needs to sign in two places, they should be a single recipient with fields in both locations, not two recipients.
• If two different people share a mailbox, use a distinct address for each so their copies and records stay separate.

The Signer You Want Is Not Selectable

A device can only be handed to a signer who is currently eligible to act. If the document has a signing order, a signer at a later level is not selectable until the parties before them have completed.

Where several in-person signers sit at the same level, all of them are selectable and you can take them in whichever order suits the room.

The Signer's View Will Not Load

A session runs in the browser against the live Inkfree signing surface, so the hosting device needs a working internet connection for the whole session. A patchy connection at a counter, a site, or an event venue is the usual cause.

What to do:

• Confirm the device is online, then reload.
• If the document itself is slow to appear, see why is my document not loading.
• If you cannot recover the session in front of the signer, take the device back and end the hand-off cleanly. The signer's status is left unchanged, so you can hand over again once you are back online.

The Signer Changed Their Mind

Nothing is broken here, but people often ask what to do. Take the device back and end the hand-off. Inkfree records whether it was returned or cancelled and leaves that signer's status alone, so the document can be handed over again later, routed to them by email instead, or voided.

Still Stuck

If a session behaves in a way none of the above explains, note the document name, the signer involved, and roughly when it happened, then contact the support team. The in-person events on the document give support a precise picture of what the session did.

For the normal end-to-end flow, see how to run an in-person signing session.