Contracts play an important part in your client experience. They provide a description of responsibilities both parties will perform, bind you and your contact to those duties or responsibilities, secure payment agreement, and provide a path of recourse if the relationship between you and your contact declines. 

You can create a Contract directly within a project, or on the Documents & Emails template page. By saving a contract template, you can then reuse it for any contact, or add it to a workflow. 

Easily access or create your Contract within your Document & Email Template page under Account Settings within the Documents & Emails template tab. 

You can also use the shortcut button located at the top right of the current page you're on. 

To create a new Contract template, click on the "new template" button and select the Contract option.

To send a Contract to your client, you must create a Contract directly from your contact's project page. To do so, click on the "Create New" button in the "Important Documents" section. Select the "Contract" option:

When creating Contracts from within a project, you can select a previously created Contract template with the dropdown menu in the top right corner of the settings:

If you're creating the Contract from scratch, use the "save as new template" check box. Then, the template can be reused at a later time. 

Once you've generated your Contract Document, give it a title to easily find the document later, a display title so your customer knows what the contract is for, and select your signature options. 

There are three Signature options you can select for your contract. This only affect your signature, not your customers. 

If you elect to sign the contract upon created, or counter-sign, your signature will appear as the "full name" listed in your account settings. 

If you have users, read our article to learn more about the name that will appear when the contract is generated. 

If more than one customer needs to sign the contract, please click the button below to learn how to add more than one contact signature to your contract. 

Now let's write your contract! You can easily type into the text editor or copy a previously created contract into the editing field. 

If you're copying content from a previously created contract, we recommend you paste the information into a plain text editor to remove the formatting, and then paste it into 17hats (rich text editors such as Microsoft Word will have hidden formatting that may result in undesired formatting). A few plain text editors you can use are notepad or textedit. You can also paste the content while holding down the SHIFT key, which will paste the information with no formatting. At that point, you can add the formatting you would like to see.  

You can further customize your contract by Adding Tokens & Forms. 

Tokens are fields that will auto-fill set information from the contacts profile, project, or your account. You can use these to auto-fill your clients contact information, your contact information, or the project or contract information.

To add a token, click the "insert token" drop down from the editing toolbar on the Contract:

For more information about Tokens and what specific Tokens can be used in Contract, click here. 

Forms are interactive elements for your clients to use when filling out the Contract.
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Forms are ideal for making sure clients read important sections of the Contract (initials), getting specific approval for terms and services within the Contract (checkbox - required), or adding in additional information as requested in the Contract (long and short text inputs).
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​ 17hats Forms include: 

You can add a form by clicking the "insert form" drop down from the editing toolbar on the Contract:

Forms and Tokens will appear as green boxes next to the text you've entered in the Contract editing view:

To set a Due Date for your Contract, click the date picker field in the bottom left of the contract editor window:

For this example, let's say you want the Due Date 7 days after the Document is sent, you would set this date to 7 days from "today" in the template's date picker. So, if you were editing the Contract Template on January 5th, to add the Due Date, you would set the date in this box to January 12th. Then when you create a Contract with this Template, the Due Date will be set to 7 days after the Contract is created. If the client doesn't sign the Contract by this date, they will receive an Automated Document Reminder if you have those turned on.

Once you finish composing your contract, hit the green Save button in the bottom right-hand corner and the information will be auto-filled. 

Once you've added all the formatting you'd like to your Contract, simply hit the "Save" button on the top right of the document. 

If you created your Contract within the Documents & Emails page, you'll see a list of all previously saved documents and emails after. 

If you created your Contract within a project, a preview of the contract will appear. You can then click the "send contract" button to craft the email to send the contract.

A pop-up will appear where you can then write a new email, or use a previously saved email. 

It is important to note that Contract emails are their own type of email template. If you're not seeing an email you created to send a contract, go to your Documents & Emails template page to make sure the Email Type is listed as "Email (contract_send)".  To learn more about Email Types, click here. 

For more information on Document & Email Templates click the button below

Feel free to reach out via Live Chat or email if you still have any remaining questions and we'll be happy to help out!

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