Contracts and signing

Writing a contract, contract types and templates, who signs and how, signing in person, and what is recorded with each signature.

A contract in Zenta CRM is prose with a headline value, a date range and a signature — not a priced breakdown. Contracts are under Sales & Invoicing → Contracts; their types and the signing wording are under Settings → Contracts & signing, and the signing half of that applies to estimates and proposals as well (E-signature).

The contracts list

Along the top, four figures for the contracts you can see:

• Active — every contract not in the trash.
• Ending within 30 days and Expired.
• Contract value — the total value of every contract not in the trash.

Below them, Contracts by type (how many of each) and Contract value by type (what each is worth), drawn in each type's own colour. Both are drawn from the same records the list is showing you, so binned contracts are on neither, and contracts with no type at all are counted together as No type at the end rather than dropped.

The list shows Subject, Customer, Type, Value, Period (open ended when there is no end date), Signatures (Not needed, Complete, or Waiting on the customer, us, or both) and Status.

• Search contracts and Any type, then tick Ending soon, Expired or Trash if you want only those, and press Filter. Trash shows only binned contracts; without it, binned ones are left out.
• Subject and value sort; Starred only and Per page are remembered for you.
• Print and Export take the filters you have set (Exporting). Export → PDFs in a zip… opens the Export PDFs screen set to contracts, filtered by start date, with the trash left out (PDFs).
• Templates opens the contract templates; the arrow beside New contract lists them under New from template.

The status badge says where each contract stands, the first that applies:

Expiry comes before signature on purpose: somebody scanning the list is looking for what needs doing, and an agreement running out next week needs doing whether or not it was signed.

Writing a contract

Press New contract.

Custom fields you have added to contracts appear too. Press Create contract and you land on its page.

Editing a contract

Edit on the contract's page opens the same form; press Save changes. The button is only there until somebody signs, and the form itself is refused for a signed contract (This contract has been signed. Create a new one rather than altering the agreed wording.), so an old link to it does not let anybody edit the wording and only find out on saving.

A contract's page

Details on the left (customer, type, value, dates, Visible to client, who has to sign, the issuing company and custom fields), the Signatures below them, and the wording on the right. A banner says when it is in the trash, has expired, ends soon, or was fully signed. Along the top:

The trash is how a contract is put away; deleting is offered only from there, so a contract always waits in the trash before it can be deleted. There is no screen for bringing back a deleted contract.

Contract types

Set the kinds of contract your business writes under Settings → Contracts & signing: a name, a colour and an order. The colour is not decoration — it is what both charts on the contracts list are drawn in, so "Retainer" is the same shade wherever it appears. The table shows each type's Order and how many Contracts are filed under it.

1. Press Add type.
2. Give it a Name (unique, up to 100 characters), pick a Colour, and give it an Order (0–999) if you care where it sits in the list.
3. Press Add type. The type then appears on the contract form, in the Any type filter on the list, and on both charts.

The pencil beside a type opens Edit contract type; press Save changes. The removes a type after a confirmation — but not one that contracts are filed under (Contracts are filed under this type. Move them first, then remove it.). Otherwise those contracts would quietly drop out of the type filter and off both charts, which looks exactly like contracts that have been deleted. Templates that used a removed type simply lose it.

Templates, "new from" and duplicating

Most businesses write the same three or four contracts over and over. Contracts → Templates keeps that wording so nobody starts from a blank page. The list shows each template's Name, Type, Value, Term and Signature; beside each, Use starts a contract from it, the pencil edits it and the removes it after Remove …? Removing a template does not touch contracts already made from it.

Press New template:

Press Save template. The pencil on the list opens the same form as Edit contract template; press Save changes.

There are three ways to avoid retyping:

• New from template — the arrow beside the New contract button, or Use on the templates list. The contract form opens already filled in, with the dates worked out from today and the customer still to be chosen.
• Save as template — on a contract you have already written. Give it a Template name and press Save template. The wording, type, value, term and who signs are kept; the customer and the actual dates are not.
• Duplicate — a fresh copy of this contract for the same customer, named Copy of …. Nothing about the original's history comes with it: no signature, no signing date. The copy starts hidden from the customer portal so you can look at it before they do, and opens for editing.

Who signs

Tick Requires a signature on a contract and then choose Who signs it:

The contract page and the list both say who has signed and who is still to. The defaults for new contracts are set under Settings → Contracts & signing (below).

Signing for the business

Signing on the company's own behalf is a separate permission from editing a contract — Sign for the business, under Staff → Roles. Plenty of people write the contract; far fewer are authorised to put the company's name to it, and a role that may do the first should not get the second by accident.

1. Press Sign for the business on the contract.
2. Check the Full name (your own name is filled in).
3. Draw in the Signature box (Clear starts again) — or, if you have saved a signature, leave Use my saved signature ticked.
4. Tick the statement and press Sign.

Anybody with that right can draw their signature once on My account and reuse it. A saved signature can only be drawn by the person it belongs to — an administrator editing somebody's staff record cannot put one there for them. A business signature is recorded against the member of staff who gave it, with their account's email.

Signing in person

When the customer is in the room, press Sign in person on the contract. That opens a screen with the agreement and a pad on it — and none of the contract's own buttons — to turn towards them. The note at the top says whose signature it will be and who is witnessing it. They type their Full name, draw in the box, tick the statement and press Sign and agree. Back to the contract leaves without signing.

A signature given that way is recorded as given in person, with the member of staff who was signed in as the witness, alongside the date and the address it came from. It is kept distinct from a signature given remotely through the portal: a dispute about one is a different argument from a dispute about the other.

The signing settings

The Signing half of Settings → Contracts & signing applies to contracts, estimates and proposals alike. Press Save changes when you are done.

Identity and the legal wording

Before anybody signs anything — contract, estimate or proposal — they have to type their full name and tick the statement. Left blank, the statement reads:

I confirm that I am the person named above, that I have read this document, and that my electronic signature is as legally binding as a signature made by hand.

Whatever it says at the moment somebody signs is copied onto their signature and kept there. Editing the wording afterwards changes what the next person agrees to and nothing at all about what anybody has already agreed to.

What each signature records

All of it is on the contract page and on the contract's PDF, so the document you hand to a solicitor carries both signatures rather than whichever was most recent. Under the signatures, Still to sign names anybody outstanding.

Hiding, binning and expiry

A contract has two switches for keeping it away from the customer, and both are honoured everywhere rather than only on the page you set them on.

Ending soon and Expired are tick boxes on the filter bar, and the two counts sit in the figures above the list, so "what is running out" is one click rather than a sort. On an expired contract the signing buttons disappear, and a signature is refused whether it comes from the portal or from staff (This contract has expired. Create a current one to sign.).

Scheduling work around documents

The automation builder (Automations) can act on the whole life of a contract, an estimate and a proposal. Use these to schedule a renewal conversation, raise a task for the account manager, or send a reminder.

A contract rule can also be narrowed on its status, its type, its value, who has to sign it, how many signatures are still outstanding, and how many days ago it started. Each of the date-based triggers fires once per contract unless you switch repeat on — so a daily sweep does not raise the same task every morning.

Addresses on this page

For reference and for anyone scripting against the panel. Everything here needs somebody signed in to the workspace whose role allows it; anybody else is refused.