Contracts

The agreement itself — what was agreed, with whom, for how much, and until when — kept as its own record with its own signature, rather than a PDF filed away and forgotten.

When you would use this: for a retainer, a statement of work, a framework agreement or anything else your firm puts a customer's name to before starting.

The list: five counters — Active, Expired, About to expire, Recently added, Trash — each a filter on the list beneath it. Expired and about-to-expire are worked out from the end date every time the screen is opened, never stored, so they are always right even on a day nothing else has run. Charts break the book down by contract type and by value.

Drafting one: a subject, the customer, optionally the project it belongs to, a contract type (a label for reporting — nothing behaves differently because of it; see "Contract types"), a value, start and end dates, an owner on your side, and the agreement's own text, which can pull in merge fields — the customer's name, the value, the dates — so the same wording works for every contract of that shape.

Sending it: moves the contract from Draft to Sent and puts a personal signing link in front of the customer. A contract is a draft until somebody sends it — nothing is offered before then.

Signing: the customer's own act, typed or drawn, on their own link — never something staff do on their behalf. What was actually signed is kept alongside the signature, including who signed, when, and from where, so that if the contract's own text changes afterwards the signature still plainly covers the wording it was given, not whatever the document says today. "Mark as signed" is a separate, deliberately lesser record — your firm's own note that the agreement was signed somewhere else (in person, by a rider stapled to it) — and it carries none of that evidence.

Renewing: moves the dates (and, if you choose, the value) forward and keeps a record of what the contract used to say; you decide whether the existing signature still counts for the renewed terms or the contract needs signing again.

Ending one: Terminate closes it out for good — a terminated contract cannot be reopened. Trash removes it from the working list without that finality; a trashed contract is excluded from every count and every list until you choose to look at the Trash view itself.

A narrower view: a role scoped to their own contracts — a Contractor, for the project they are on — sees only the contract that governs their own work, read-only.

When it refuses: no Contracts item in your menu means your firm has not switched contracts on, or you lack the permission — ask an Owner or Admin. A terminated contract refuses every further change; start a new one instead.