🖊️Contracts

Build your inspection agreements in the Contract Editor, attach them to a job, and let clients sign online from the client portal.

ScribeWare 7 keeps your inspection agreements in one place. You write each agreement once in the Contract Editor, drop in placeholders for anything that changes job-to-job, and ScribeWare fills those in for every inspection. Clients read and sign in their browser — no printing, no scanning, no separate e-sign subscription.

Where Contracts Live

Everything about a contract happens in one of three places:

What you're doing	Where to go
Writing or editing an agreement	Settings → Contracts
Choosing which agreements a job needs	Report → Client Info → Inspection Details → Contract(s)
Reading a signed copy	Report → Client Info → Report Links → Signed Contracts

Writing an Agreement

Open Settings, then Contracts under the SCHEDULING heading. The page is titled Contract Editor.

The Contract Editor — pick an agreement from Contract Type, edit it, and save

• The Contract Type dropdown lists every agreement on your account. The first entry, + Add New Contract, starts a new one.

• The pencil next to the dropdown renames the current agreement — and is also where you delete it.

• Save (⌘S) commits your changes. If you switch to another agreement with unsaved edits, ScribeWare asks Save changes? first.

Your company logo appears automatically at the top of every agreement if you've set a white-background logo in Settings → Company. You don't paste it in.

Contracts are shared across your whole company, not per-user. Anyone on your team with template-editing rights sees and edits the same set.

Placeholders

Anything that changes from job to job goes in as a placeholder rather than typed text. Put your cursor where the value belongs and pick from the Insert Placeholder dropdown in the toolbar. Placeholders show up as grey chips while you're editing and become real values when the client opens the agreement.

These are the placeholders in the dropdown:

Placeholder	Fills in with
Company Name	Your company name
Inspector Name(s)	Everyone assigned to the inspection
Inspector License(s)	The assigned inspectors' license numbers
Client Name	The client on the report
Agent Name	The agent on the report
Client Address (One Line)	The property address, on one line
Inspection Date	The scheduled date
Inspection Time	The scheduled start time
Report Number	The report's number
Invoice Total	The invoice total for the job
Contract Send Date	The date the agreement went out
Contract Signed Date	The date the client signed

Any Custom Questions you've set up in Settings → Scheduling are added to the bottom of this same dropdown, so an answer a client gave while booking can be written straight into the agreement.

Don't paste a report or portal link directly into an agreement. Those links are specific to one job — use a placeholder so every client gets their own.

Signatures

You don't draw or position signature boxes. ScribeWare appends the signature block to the bottom of every agreement automatically when the client signs, including their signature, their typed name, the date and time, and the IP address they signed from.

Putting a Contract on a Job

A contract reaches a report three ways:

1. Automatically, from the service. If you've attached agreements to an inspection type or add-on in Settings → Services, choosing that service on a report pulls its agreements in — and drops the ones from a service you deselected.

2. Automatically, from the report template. Applying a template that has agreements attached sets the report's contract list.

3. By hand. In the report, open Client Info → Inspection Details and use the Contract(s) picker. It's a multi-select with checkboxes, so a job can carry more than one agreement.

Agreements you add by hand are left alone when services change — only the service-derived ones get swapped.

Change the contracts on an already-confirmed job and ScribeWare raises a banner: The contracts for this inspection have changed. Notify your clients? Change them on a job the client has already signed and you'll be asked to confirm — the client will have to sign again.

Getting It Signed

There's no separate "send contracts" button in ScribeWare 7. The agreement goes out with the appointment confirmation.

1. Open the report and go to Client Info.

2. Click Confirm appointment at the top of the page.

3. The Contact Client dialog opens, pre-filled from your default confirmation message — which contains the client's portal link.

4. Click Send Email. (Confirm without sending email marks the appointment confirmed but sends nothing.)

For more on the message that goes out, see message-templates.md.

Confirming an appointment — the template fills in with this client's details and their portal link

What Your Client Sees

The client opens their portal link and sees a Review & Sign Contract card with a Sign button.

The client portal — signing and paying are the two next steps

The whole signing experience, from the portal to a completed agreement

On the signing page:

• Each agreement appears in full, with your logo, followed by a dashed Click to sign box.

• Clicking it opens Add your signature — they enter their full legal name and either Type or Draw a signature.

• If the job has more than one agreement, the first signature is reused for the rest automatically. They don't sign twice.

• Two checkboxes have to be ticked: agreeing to the contracts, and agreeing to the ScribeWare Electronic Signature Disclosure.

• Continue submits.

Clients type or draw their signature — the typed version is rendered in a script face

ScribeWare then builds a PDF and emails a copy to the client and a copy to your company.

Tracking Status

A report with agreements on it shows a Signed / Not Signed indicator in the report's status strip, on the home screen report card, and on the calendar (as Contract signed / Contract pending).

Every step is logged too. Client Info → Report Activity records when the portal was opened, when the agreement was opened, and who signed it.

Report Activity — the paper trail for a job, newest first

Once signed, Client Info → Report Links → Signed Contracts holds the PDF links — View Signed Contract for the first, and View Contract Addendum 1, 2, and so on for any others.

If you upgraded from an earlier version of ScribeWare, agreements your clients signed back then are carried forward. They show up in that same Signed Contracts list, so old jobs keep their paperwork.

Locking Reports Until the Client Signs

Under Settings → Client Invoicing → Report Access you can turn on Require signature and payment before clients can view published reports. With it on, a published report stays locked until the client has both signed and paid.

Individual jobs can override it. In the report, Client Info → Report Links → Client Access lets you choose the company default, force the requirement, or drop it for this job — plus a manual Lock / Unlock.

💳Client Invoicing and Payments