Have you opened a document preview and seen {{first_name}} instead of the recipient's actual name?
Don't worry, nothing's broken. Here's what's going on.
There's two different types of links
When you create a document, you automatically get a general Preview Link.
This is a generic view of the document that isn’t assigned to a specific recipient.
Once you send the document, each recipient gets their own Trackable Document Link.
This link is unique to them and is how we track who's opened the document, when, and what they've viewed. This lets us make sure the right person sees the right details.
Why the merge tags behave differently
General Preview Link → Since it is NOT tied to any recipient, it has no customer data to pull from. So merge tags like {{first_name}}, {{last_name}}, and {{email_address}} stay as literal placeholder text. Tags like {{company_name}}, for example, will work just fine, as that's global information to the document, not specific data to each recipient.
Trackable Document Link → Since this link is tied to a specific recipient, the system pulls their recipient information from the sending page and swaps the merge tags for real data.
So {{first_name}} becomes "John," for example.
Example
General Preview: https://betterproposals.io/proposal/?ProposalID=rdQvJX-TOF6pSXOYr13m8x_h2Y4SrKekZEHUhu143rE&debug=yes → shows {{first_name}}
Trackable Link (recipient-specific): https://betterproposals.io/proposal/?ProposalID=rdQvJX-TOF6pSXOYr13m8x_h2Y4SrKekZEHUhu143rE&ContactID=hl1EXZX5oDnMPX670k2XUVp_6prjBQZ6wG-5lHtRYcM → shows the actual recipient name (John)
Notice the difference in the links - The trackable link includes a Contact ID in the URL.
That ID is what tells the system the correct recipient data to pull into the document.