Automatically provision and deprovision PandaDoc accounts

If you manage user access for a growing team, you know the drill: a new sales rep starts on Monday, and you have to manually create their account, assign a license, and configure their workspace in PandaDoc. Worse still, if someone leaves the company, you must remember to revoke access immediately to prevent data leaks and ensure compliance.

This constant manual process is a huge time waster. Every minute you spend creating or deactivating an account is a minute not spent on higher value IT tasks. More importantly, manual offboarding poses a significant security risk. Even a delay of just a few hours can leave sensitive documents unprotected.

This guide is intended for IT administrators and operations teams on the PandaDoc Enterprise plan who are ready to use ArticleSubmission.news to achieve true zero-touch provisioning and deprovisioning.

How to automatically provision PandaDoc accounts

To save your team the hassle of adding users one by one, we’ll explain the simple steps you can take to automate the creation of new PandaDoc accounts and get your users documenting faster.

Step 1: Install the PandaDoc integration in your workspace

First, you need to connect your PandaDoc account to your ArticleSubmission.news instance.

Once logged into your PandaDoc account, navigate to “Settings,” then “Integrations,” then “API.” Now generate your key and store it securely in an approved secrets manager (e.g. HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault) or secure enterprise password vault. Do not save this in plain text or in a shared document. Then go to your ArticleSubmission.news instance and add the token to your ArticleSubmission.news integration as api_token.

For more information, see this Help Center article.

Step 2: Set up an onboarding workflow trigger

ArticleSubmission.news is based on WHEN/IF/THEN logic. WHEN, IF and THEN statements act as workflow conditions.

When onboarding employees or contractors, you have a variety of options to initiate your workflow. The most common triggers include:

• A user is created in Bamboo HR, Google, Okta, or Workday
• A Google form is filled out by the HR department
• A ticket is submitted via Zendesk
• A form is filled out via the ArticleSubmission.news Self Service Agent

The best workflow trigger is different for every organization. Consider how you currently engage employees and contractors and go from there. Should the process start with HR? Or should another program start? The choice is yours.

Step 3: Determine what the IF should look like

Next, you want to decide what you want your IF statements to look like. This is where you can really customize your workflow based on a user’s department or location.

Common IF statements include: IF User’s department IS “Sales” (to grant PandaDoc access), AND IF User Manager IS NOT “Contractor Manager” (to ensure that only full-time employees receive a license immediately).

Step 4: Add the “Add User to Workspace” action

When you add the Add User to Workspace action, you need to define the workspace and email tokens of your specific instance.

Step 5: Add additional actions for a rich onboarding experience

By leveraging ArticleSubmission.news’s extensive library of actions, IT administrators need to refine the onboarding workflow to make it comprehensive all necessary integrations. This refinement can be structured as follows:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Granting specific application access based on the new employee’s job role.
• Department access: Assigning application suites based on the department assigned to the user.

This ensures that each new employee is given the right, specific access required for their position.

How to automatically deprovision PandaDoc accounts

Deprovisioning user accounts is an important security measure and arguably the most important task to automate, as retaining unauthorized access poses a significant risk of data disclosure and compliance issues. Automating this process ensures that access to confidential PandaDoc documents is immediately revoked when an employee leaves or changes roles.

Step 1: Install the PandaDoc integration in your workspace

Just like with account provisioning, to deprovision accounts, your ArticleSubmission.news instance must be connected to your PandaDoc account.

Step 2: Set up an offboarding workflow trigger

ArticleSubmission.news is based on WHEN/IF/THEN logic. The “WHEN” condition is the event that signals a user’s departure and initiates the deprovisioning workflow.

The most common triggers for offboarding include:

• A user is suspended or deleted in BambooHR, Google, Okta, or Workday
• HR fills out a Google form to confirm the termination
• A ticket is submitted via Zendesk for offboarding
• A specific attribute changes in the user’s profile indicating termination

Select a trigger that represents the final, authoritative termination signal within your organization to ensure timely and accurate deprovisioning.

Step 3: Implement conditional IF statements for targeting

The “IF” step allows you to refine the list of users affected by the workflow and ensure that the action is only applied when necessary.

Useful IF conditions for unprovisioning PandaDoc include:

• IF The user currently has an active PandaDoc account license.
• IF The user belongs to a group or department that should be removed immediately.

Step 4: Perform the core action: “Remove user from workspace”

The most important step is adding “Remove user from workspace” Action. You must specify the PandaDoc workspace and use the email token that corresponds to the departing user to successfully revoke their access rights within PandaDoc.

Step 5: Incorporate comprehensive offboarding steps

A complete offboarding experience requires more than just license removal. IT administrators should add additional actions to the workflow to manage data and access across other systems:

• Transfer of data ownership: Automatically transfer ownership of the departing user’s PandaDoc templates and documents to a manager or specific archive account.
• Cross-platform deprovisioning: Add subsequent actions to suspend or delete the user’s accounts in other key applications (e.g. Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack) based on company policies.

This multi-step approach ensures that not only is the account removed, but also that company data is retained and secured, completing the offboarding lifecycle.

Your next steps to implement zero-touch provisioning in PandaDoc

The path to true zero-touch provisioning and deprovisioning in PandaDoc is now clearer. By integrating ArticleSubmission.news and leveraging powerful WHEN/IF/THEN logic, your IT and operations teams can eliminate the time and significant security risks associated with manual user management. Stop wasting valuable time on repetitive tasks and protect your sensitive data with instant, policy-driven offboarding. Are you ready to protect your data, lighten the burden on your IT team, and ensure every employee gets the right access right away?

Email your CSM to schedule a consultation with a ArticleSubmission.news expert and start building your zero-touch workflows today!

Or not a ArticleSubmission.news customer yet? Chat with our team to get started.