What’s the difference between users, contacts, teams, and contact groups?

When you’re working in a BoldSign platform for managing documents or sending agreements for signing, you’ll often see options to add Users, Contacts, Teams, or Contact Groups. While they may sound similar, each one plays a very different role.

Users: People inside your organization

A User is someone who works within your company or team. Think of them as your coworkers or internal staff. These people have access to BoldSign account—they can log in with a username and password, and they’re assigned specific roles such as Admin, Team Admin or Member.

Users are people who are registered on the BoldSign platform and have access to its services, allowing them to send, receive, and manage documents electronically.

For example, if your HR manager needs to track who has signed a policy document or your sales rep needs to send contracts to clients, they should be added as Users. They actively interact with the system and do more than just receive documents—they help manage them.

Contacts: People outside your organization

Contacts, on the other hand, are external individuals like clients, vendors, legal advisors, or partners. They don’t have login access to your system. Instead, you simply store their information so you can send them documents, emails, or requests—such as asking them to sign a contract.

Recipients you add to a document are automatically saved as contacts, and they don’t need a BoldSign account to access the documents.

A good example is a lawyer who regularly signs contracts you send. They don’t need to manage anything in your system; they just need to receive the documents. So you would add them as a Contact.

When to use a user vs. a contact

Here’s a simple way to decide:

• If the person needs to log in and manage anything—templates, documents, reports—they should be a User.

• If the person only needs to receive or sign documents, but doesn’t need platform access, they should be a Contact.

Teams: Organizing your internal staff

Now let’s talk about Teams. Teams are used to organize your Users (the people inside your company). You might create a team for your Sales Department, another for HR, and one for IT Support.

Each team can have different access levels or responsibilities. Maybe the Sales Team can only access customer contracts, while the HR Team manages internal policy documents. Teams help you control who can see and do what.

Contact Groups: Organizing your external contacts

While Teams are for Users, Contact Groups are for Contacts. These are simple groupings of your external people. For instance, if you regularly send updates or agreements to ten legal advisors, you can put them in a Contact Group.

Contact Groups don’t have permissions—they just help you send things quickly to multiple people at once.

How do you decide whether to use a team or a contact group?

Here’s a helpful way to think about it:

Use a Team when you want to manage what internal users can see and do.

Use a Contact Group when you want to send the document to a group of external people.

Let’s walk through a few common situations:

1. An employee needs to create templates and track documents → They should be added as a User and possibly placed in a Team like “Operations.”
2. A client needs to sign a contract you send them → They’re a Contact. You can also add them to a Contact Group like “VIP Clients” if you send things to them often.
3. You have a marketing department that needs specific access → Create a Team for “Marketing” and add your Users there with the right permissions.
4. You often send agreements to ten different vendors → Create a Contact Group named “Vendors” and add them all in one place for quick sending.

Quick Guide: Users & Contacts

• Users: People inside your company with login access and permissions.
• Contacts: External people you communicate with, but who don’t log in.
• Teams: Groups of Users to manage internal roles and access.
• Contact Groups: Groups of Contacts to send documents or messages easily.