Once a waiver has been published in WaveRez, its form structure is locked. This is a deliberate design decision to protect the integrity of every signed waiver. Every customer who signed needs to be able to point to the exact form they signed, with no possibility of post-signature edits. To make changes, you create a new version of the waiver, publish it, and let the system route new bookings to it. This article walks you through that process and covers what happens to your existing customers along the way.
Why Published Waivers Cannot Be Edited
If a waiver could be edited after publishing, several questions would arise that could undermine its legal value. Which version did the customer actually sign? Were they aware of any later changes? Could the wording have been altered after an incident occurred? Is the waiver still enforceable?
WaveRez avoids these questions entirely by locking the form structure once published. Every signature in your account is tied to a specific waiver version that has not changed since the moment it was signed. To update your waiver, you publish a new version, and customers who signed the previous version remain associated with the version they actually saw and signed.
What You Can Still Change on a Published Waiver
The Trip assignments on a published waiver can be modified at any time. You can add a newly-created trip to an existing published waiver or remove a trip from one. Trip changes do not require duplication or re-publishing.
Everything else on a published waiver, including the form steps, fields, conditional logic, terms content, video links, and settings, is locked.
How to Replace a Published Waiver
Use this process when you need to update the form structure, terms, or any field configuration on a waiver that is already live.
Step 1 — Open the waiver you want to update. Navigate to Waivers in the left menu and find the published waiver in the Active list.
Step 2 — Click the three-dot menu and select Copy waiver. This creates a duplicate of the existing waiver in draft status. The duplicate carries over the entire form structure and Settings, but it does not carry over the Trip assignments. You will add those during setup.
Step 3 — Open the draft and make your changes. Edit the form, update terms, change settings, or restructure as needed. The waiver remains in draft and is not yet visible to any customers.
Step 4 — Assign trips on the draft's Settings tab. Add the trips you want this new version to cover. Trips that are currently on the original published waiver can be selected here. The conflict will be detected when you publish.
Step 5 — Save and publish the new version. Click Save and choose Save and Publish. A confirmation modal warns that the form will be locked after publishing. Click Publish.
Step 6 — Resolve the trip conflict. The "Trip already uses a waiver" modal appears, listing the trips currently linked to your previous version. Click Publish and overwrite trips. The system moves those trips from the old waiver to the new one. New bookings on those trips will receive the new waiver going forward.
Step 7 — Inactivate the previous version (optional). The old waiver is no longer attached to any trips, so it will not generate any new customer links. You can leave it in your account as-is for reference, or you can inactivate it via its three-dot menu to move it to the Inactive tab. Inactivated waivers can be restored later if needed.
What Happens to Customers Who Booked Under the Old Waiver
Customers who placed their order before the new version was published are pinned to the original waiver. Their existing waiver links continue to work and continue to point at the original version of the form they were assigned. Already-completed waivers remain attached to their orders.
This means:
A customer who has not completed their waiver yet but received the email under the old version will fill out the old version when they click their link.
A customer who already completed their waiver under the old version retains their completed waiver in their order record.
Future customers booking the same trip will be sent the new version.
There is currently no in-system way to push the new waiver to customers who already booked under an older version. If you need previously-booked customers to sign your current waiver, see the article on sending a waiver to an existing customer.
Inactivating and Restoring a Waiver
You can move any waiver to the Inactive list via its three-dot menu's Inactivate option. Inactivated waivers stop appearing on your Active waivers list, but their existing customer links continue to work for anyone who already received them. Already-completed waivers stay attached to their orders.
To restore an inactive waiver, navigate to the Inactive tab on the Waivers list, find the waiver, and click the three-dot menu and Activate. WaveRez will ask whether you want to Restore without trips or Restore with previous trips. Restoring with previous trips will reattach the waiver to the trips it was on before deactivation, which may trigger a trip conflict if those trips have since been assigned to another active waiver.
Naming Your Waiver Versions for Easier Tracking
Because both the internal Waiver name and the customer-facing Title can be duplicated across waivers, multiple versions of the same waiver can have identical names in your Waivers list. To keep track of revisions, include a version indicator in your Waiver name, for example "Pontoon Waiver V1," "Pontoon Waiver V2," "Pontoon Waiver V3."
The internal Waiver name cannot be changed after creation, so choose your versioning scheme intentionally when you create a copy.