How to Send a Contract for Signature, Start to Signed

This is the first part of Start to Signed, a ten-part field guide to sending contracts with APISign. A new part comes out every Tuesday until the middle of January. We'll go from the very first send to signing on a phone, multiple signers, the law, the API, and what to do when something goes wrong.

To keep it concrete, we'll follow one small business through the winter: Nordlys Renovation, a two-person renovation firm in Denmark run by Gilberto's nephew. Like Gilberto, he's made up. His paperwork problems are not. In one of Gilberto's first posts, he'd been handed a 47-page contractor agreement for a three-week bathroom job. This winter his bathroom agreement is two pages, and it goes out by email.

Here's how he sends it, and how you can send yours.

What you need

• An APISign account. Every new organization starts with $5.00 of credit, which covers 20 contracts. No card required.
• A contract. A template from our library, a Word document you already use, or one you write from scratch.
• The signer's name and email address. That's all they need. Signers don't create an account or download an app.

1. Create your account

Sign up with your email. You'll be asked to name your organization: use your business name, because signers see it on the signing email and the signing page.

Sending costs $0.25 per contract, however many people sign it. There's no plan to pick and no monthly fee. We'll come back to how credit works in the last part of the series.

2. Turn your contract into a template

A template is a contract with blanks in it. You set it up once and fill in the blanks each time you send it.

Go to Templates → Create Template. You have three ways in:

• Browse Template Library: start from one of our ready-made agreements, like an NDA, a service agreement, or an independent contractor agreement. Next week's part is a tour of the ones small businesses use most.
• Import Document: upload the .docx you already send. We wrote a whole guide on Word imports, including what doesn't survive the trip.
• Blank Template: write it in the editor.

The blanks are variables: a name in double curly braces, like {{client_name}} or {{total_price}}. In the Variables tab, you decide who fills in each one:

• Creator fields are filled in by you when you create the contract: names, prices, dates, the job description.
• Signer fields are filled in by the person signing: their signature, initials, and the time they signed.

Every template needs at least one signature field filled in by a signer. It won't save without one, because a contract nobody can sign isn't one.

Nordlys's template has creator fields for the client's name, the address, the scope of work, the price and the start date, plus {{client_signature}} and {{contractor_signature}} for the two signatures.

3. Create the contract

Go to Contracts → New contract. The wizard has a few short steps.

Details. Under Source, choose your template. Give the contract a name your client will recognize, like "Bathroom renovation, 14 Strandvej", because it appears in the subject line of their email. Expires In is how many days the signer has before the link stops working. It defaults to 30, which is generous for most things; we'll talk about picking a deadline in part 4.

Signers. Enter each signer's name and email.

Variables. Under Fill in now, fill in your creator fields. The Live Preview shows the contract exactly as the signer will read it. Read it. This is the moment typos are free to fix.

Review. Check the summary, then click Create Contract.

What you have now is a draft. Nothing has been emailed and nothing has been charged. If you spot a mistake now, delete the draft and create it again; it costs nothing.

The mistake almost everyone makes once

Most two-party contracts have a signature line for each side. Nordlys's template does: one for the client and one for the contractor.

If you add only your client as a signer, they'll be shown every signature field, including yours. They'd end up signing on both lines.

The fix is to add yourself as a signer too. On the Signers step, click Add Another Signer and enter your own name and email. Then, on the Variables step under Assign to signers, give {{client_signature}} to your client and {{contractor_signature}} to yourself. Each person is shown only the fields assigned to them. Part 3 of this series goes into multiple signers in detail.

4. Send a test to yourself first

Before a real client sees a new template, send it to yourself. On the Details step, tick Send as a test.

A test contract runs the whole flow with three differences:

• The signing email goes to you, not the signers you entered.
• It's free, and works even with no credit on your account.
• The finished PDF is stamped TEST, so it can't be mistaken for a binding document.

Sign it the way your client would, ideally on your phone, then open the PDF. Look for an empty variable, a heading that came through as plain text, or a price with the wrong currency symbol. Fix the template, then create the real contract.

"Send as a test" is chosen when you create a contract, so a test is its own contract. When you're happy, create the real one from the same template without the box ticked.

5. Send it

Open the draft and click Send for signature. The confirmation dialog shows the price. Click Send · $0.25.

Every signer gets an email at the same moment:

• It comes from your organization's name.
• The subject is "Please sign:" followed by the contract name.
• There's one button: Review & Sign Document.

The signer opens it, reads the contract, draws their signature with a mouse or a finger, and submits. Part 8 walks through exactly what they see.

6. Watch it come back

The contract page has a tracker along the top: Created → Sent → Opened → Signatures → Completed.

• Opened lights up when a signer opens the signing page. Not the email: the actual contract.
• Signatures fills in as each person signs.
• Completed means everyone has signed and the PDF is ready.

When the last signature arrives, APISign builds the final PDF with every signature and the date each was signed, and seals it. Everyone who signed, and your organization, gets an email with the signed PDF attached. On the contract page, the main button becomes Signed PDF.

That's it. Start to signed.

A checklist before you click Send

• Did you read the Live Preview, all the way down?
• Does every party who signs have their own signature field, assigned to them?
• Is the contract name something your client will recognize in their inbox?
• Is the deadline in Expires In realistic? It can't be changed once the contract is created.
• For a new template: did you send yourself a test first?

No account yet? Sign up: your first 20 contracts are on us. The quick start covers the same ground in reference form, and the contracts docs go deeper on statuses and test mode.