Workplace
Anything on your letterhead is a commitment somebody can hold you to.
An appointment letter, a salary revision, an experience certificate, a relieving letter. In most companies any one of them can be produced, altered and sent by one person in an afternoon, from a template in a shared folder that nobody owns.
The separation
Drafting and issuing are different permissions.
An operator drafts: the letter is rendered from a template, previewed, and its exact content fixed at that moment. Issuing it is a separate act behind a separate permission.
A company that does not want anything going out on its letterhead without a second person can enforce that with a role rather than a convention that holds until somebody is on leave.
- DraftOperatorrendered from the template, and its exact content fixed
- PreviewOperatorwhat the recipient will see, before anyone can see it
- IssueReviewera separate permission — this is the two-pairs-of-eyes step
- SignRecipienton a single-use link, with the evidence recorded
- RevokeReviewerkills an outstanding link on a letter already out
- Templates are versioned per workspace —
With reusable fragments kept separate, so a change to a standard clause does not mean editing nine templates and missing one.
- The content is fixed at draft —
What was reviewed is what gets issued. A letter cannot change between approval and sending.
- Signing links are single-use —
Which is the defence against a link being forwarded to somebody who was not the intended signer.
- An issued letter can be revoked —
Killing the outstanding link. Mistakes leave the building faster than corrections do.
And the documents themselves
Held once, shared deliberately.
Documents live on the employee record rather than in a folder structure one person understands — and a single document can be shared outward with somebody who has no login, as a link issued for that one file and shown to you once.
The alternative every company actually uses is emailing the PDF, which is a copy that cannot be withdrawn, sent to an address nobody verified.
What HR asks
Mostly about control over what goes out.
›Can one person draft and issue a letter?
Only if you give them both permissions. They are separate by design so that a maker-checker separation is enforceable rather than aspirational.
›What if we send a letter with a mistake?
Revoke it, which kills the outstanding signing link, and issue a corrected one. What you cannot do is quietly alter a letter that has already gone.
›Can a signing link be forwarded?
It can be forwarded; it cannot be reused. Single-use is the defence, and the signature carries the circumstances it was made under.
›Do we have to use your templates?
They are yours, versioned in your workspace, with shared fragments for the clauses that repeat.
›Can employees get their own letters?
Yes, from the portal — which removes the most common HR request there is.
- Draft a letter as an operator and try to issue it
- Issue it as a reviewer instead
- Sign it, then try the link a second time
- Revoke one that is already out