Set agreement retention and signing services

Decide how long Nova keeps signed, cancelled and draft agreements, protect agreements on legal hold, and choose whether an outside signing service handles your agreements.

In the sidebar, open Settings, then choose Agreement Settings under Agreements. The page address is /settings/org/agreements. This article covers Retention and legal-hold defaults and Execution providers, the two sections above Operational posture at the bottom.

Before you start

• Your role needs permission to manage agreement settings.
• Retention needs to be in your plan, and your role needs permission to manage retention. When both are true, the section shows Retention enabled; otherwise it shows Read-only and a note replaces its fields.
• Most organizations keep the built-in signing service and never add a provider. Add one only if you already have an account with an outside signing service.
• Everything saves with the one Save settings button at the top of the page.

Steps

1. Under Retention and legal-hold defaults, set Keep completed agreements for, Keep canceled or expired agreements for and Clean up abandoned drafts after, all in days.
2. Switch on Protect agreements on legal hold from deletion so a held agreement is never permanently deleted. The note under Legal-hold controls tells you whether you can put agreements on legal hold from their own pages.
3. Under Execution providers, leave Default signing service on Internal to use Nova's own signing.
4. If you use an outside service, switch on Fall back to built-in signing so agreements still go out if that service fails, and decide whether to Refresh status when opened and Check for updates in the background.
5. To connect an outside service, press Add provider. A card marked New provider appears. Fill in Service ID (a short lowercase name such as docusign), Display name, Type (Internal or External), and the connection details your provider gave you: Credential location, Account ID, Connected account ID, Service web address, Wait time (seconds) and Verification key location. Switch on Turned on so the service can be chosen.
6. Press Save settings.

What you see

• The summary strip shows Providers with how many services are set up and which one is the default, and Operational posture repeats Retention defaults.
• With no outside service added, the Execution providers section explains that agreements keep using the internal service.
• Remove on a provider card takes it out of the list once you save.

If something looks different

• A note stands in for the retention fields and the badge reads Read-only: retention is not in your plan, or your role cannot manage it.
• Save settings does nothing and no red text shows: two provider cards may share the same Service ID. Give each card its own.
• Saving fails on Advanced settings: the text must be a valid technical block from your provider. Leave it blank if you are unsure.
• A Service web address is refused: it has to be a complete web address, such as one starting with https://.

Open Agreement Settings