Signing Groups permission admin only?

Hi ​@Donna Sevigny, 
 
Thanks for reaching out here in the Docusign Community! We're glad to have you here. We understand that you want clarification on how the Signing group works and its restrictions.

To clarify, Administrators are the only ones who can manage signing groups because these groups share documents/envelopes and legal authority to sign contracts.
 
Our platform restricts this setup to admins to maintain compliance and tracking across the company and the account.
 
You are right. In standard Docusign setups, signing groups are visible as a contact to every single user in the account when creating an envelope, and there is no native setting to restrict that visibility.
Because of this platform design, your concern about unrelated business areas seeing and misusing your group is very valid.
 
Since we cannot hide the signing group, here are two alternative workarounds to secure your workflow:

1. Use a Shared Email Alias Instead: Use an internal IT email alias (like legal-reviews@yourcompany.com). Anyone can send to it, but only your approved team members will have access to that inbox to open and sign the document on this account. 
2. Strict Naming Conventions: Ask your admin to name the signing group with a clear prefix (e.g., DO_NOT_USE_HR_ONLY_Manager_Approval). This acts as a manual safeguard to prevent other users from accidentally selecting it. 

Note: 

• Once one person in the group signs, the document is complete for everyone. This can cause confusion if two people try to review it at once.
• If a team member leaves, an admin must manually remove them promptly to avoid security gaps.

 However, your feedback about restricting visibility of signing groups to specific senders/users is a great and highly valuable Idea! I recommend submitting this request to the Docusign Ideas Channel, as our product engineers review it directly and might consider it for future updates.

Let me know if you have any questions! Thank you, and have a great day ahead!

Best Regards, 
Luke | Docusign Community Moderator
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