The agreement is built the moment the customer submits their information form. It carries their legal name, the job site, the approved price and the payment stages, plus the lien notice for their state — and its price table lists every line at the customer's price, with your markup built in, so nothing on it reads as your cost. The customer signs it on their phone and you counter-sign. Both signatures live on one document, each with its own date and time. The operating system for post-frame and barndominium builders, so the contract comes off the same estimate that priced the posts, the porch and the slab — not a Word file kept somewhere else.
Also called: project agreement · construction agreement · builder contract · customer contract · e-signature contract
It starts the moment they approve
The customer approves the estimate on their own page and the agreement begins there — not in a Word file on your laptop that evening. Approval is the trigger, and the price it approves is the price the contract will carry. There is no step in between where a number can be retyped.
The customer says yes, and then the builder has to sit down and write a contract — which means it happens in the evening, or at the weekend, or on Monday. Meanwhile the customer is standing still, wondering whether he picked the right builder, and the only signal he is getting is silence.
A customer who said yes on Tuesday and gets paper on Friday has had three days to find a reason. Starting the agreement at approval removes those days without anyone in the office lifting a finger — and the deal is signed while the excitement is real.
They fill in their own legal details
Try itThe form asks for the things a contract needs and nobody enjoys chasing: legal name, mailing address, the build site, ownership, and — if you turn the sections on — permits and HOA. The customer fills it in themselves, from the same link they approved on. You choose which sections appear.
The builder types the customer's name off a lead form, which had it as “Mike” rather than “Michael J.”, and the address off the estimate, which is the mailing address and not the build site. Both are wrong on a signed document, and neither is noticed until the county asks.
The customer knows their legal name and build site; your office doesn't. Asking the person who knows is faster and right the first time — so the county never finds "Mike" on a signed contract.
The agreement writes itself from the estimate
Their details land and the agreement is already assembled: legal name, build site, the approved total, the line items, the dates. Nothing is retyped, so nothing can drift. This is the document the moment it exists — before you have touched it.
The estimate says $184,200 and the contract says $184,000, because somebody typed it. Now there is a signed piece of paper for the lower figure, and the argument about which one governs is one the builder loses on principle even when he is right.
A customer who finds $184,000 on the contract and $184,200 on the quote stops trusting both. Generating the agreement from the same numbers means the two can't differ — and the builder never loses an argument over a typo.
Your clauses, not ours
The body is your template — your terms, your warranty language, your exclusions — with tokens where the job's facts go. Change it once and every future agreement carries it. One contract can be switched to a different template without disturbing the others.
Software that ships its own contract puts the builder in the position of either signing something he has not read or abandoning the automation entirely. Most abandon it, and go back to the Word file — which is how you end up with a system that does everything except the document that matters.
A builder's contract is what his lawyer wrote and twenty years taught him. We automate the assembly, not the terms — so he keeps using the system instead of going back to the Word file, and every agreement says exactly what he means.
The payment stages are the ones you actually use
The schedule in the agreement is your terms for this job — 30/60/10, or 50/50, or four draws, whatever you set. Save the ones you use as presets and the right schedule lands without being chosen. The same stages later become the invoices.
A contract that quietly falls back to 50% at framing when your real terms are 30% down states a first payment nearly seven thousand dollars too high on a thirty-four thousand dollar job — in a document the customer signs.
The payment schedule is the paragraph a customer reads twice — and it sets your cash for the next four months. Reading it off the job rather than a default means the agreement states terms you'll actually stand behind.
The price table adds up to the quote — and never shows your cost
The agreement's line-items table, and its material and labour figures, are filled from the customer's prices: every material section, the labour and each service with your markup built in, adding up under the Subtotal, Tax and Total to the figure they approved. It used to list the kit at cost under a total with the markup in it — a margin anyone with a calculator could read. If you sell cost-plus and sent the estimate with the markup line on, the table prints a Markup row instead.
The customer adds up the contract's lines, finds them tens of thousands short of the total, and the signing turns into a conversation about your margin.
People sign a document that agrees with itself. Lines that add up to the total, with nothing that looks like profit, keep the signing about the building — and keep your margin your business.
The lien notice matches where you are building
Try itThe governing-law block is chosen from the build site's state, off their form — not from where your office is. Missouri and Kansas have their own statutory wording; elsewhere the agreement names the state and its lien rights generally.
The contract carries the notice for the state the builder lives in, on a job forty miles across the line. It is wrong in a way nobody reads until it matters, and the only person who ever finds it is somebody being paid to find it.
A builder working forty miles across the state line shouldn't have to remember whose law applies. The site address picks the notice, so a whole category of mistake disappears — the kind only a lawyer finds, at the worst time.
The whole agreement, before anybody signs
The customer reads it end to end on their phone — every clause, the line items, the schedule, the notice. Not a summary and a checkbox. The document they sign is the document they scrolled through.
The customer gets a PDF attachment, opens page one on a phone, scrolls past the rest, and signs. Everything the builder carefully wrote about site access, change orders and what is excluded has been technically delivered and actually not read — which is exactly as useless as not sending it.
A customer who actually read the exclusions doesn't ring in month three about the concrete apron. The document they sign is the one they scrolled through on their phone, which protects both sides when a question does come.
Initial every section, and the server checks
Each numbered clause takes its own initials, with a live count of what is left. The manifest of required sections is frozen onto the contract when it is generated, and the server refuses the signature if one is missing — it names the section rather than failing quietly.
A dispute comes down to whether the customer was told about the allowance, and the only evidence is one signature at the end of an eleven-page document. It proves the document existed. It does not prove anybody got to page nine.
'They signed it' and 'they read clause 7' are different claims — only the second wins a dispute. Initials against a frozen list, checked on the server, make that provable for the builder and impossible to skip.
They sign on the phone, in the truck
A drawn signature, on the device already in their hand. No account, no app, no printer, no password. The signature image, the timestamp, the IP address and the browser are all captured with it.
“I'll print it, sign it, scan it and send it back” is a sentence that means next week. Half of them never find a scanner, a third send back a photograph at an angle, and the builder has a stack of documents he cannot line up with anything.
Customers decide where they are, not where the printer is. Signing on the phone removes every step where a yes turns into next week, and the audit trail is captured in the same moment.
You read it before they ever see it
Nothing goes out on its own. Review and Send puts the assembled agreement in front of you first — edit the body, fix a date, change the template for this one job — and it goes when you send it.
A tool sends the contract automatically, gets one field wrong, and the first person to see the mistake is the customer. Now the builder is explaining his own software to somebody who was about to give him a hundred thousand dollars.
No builder wants his customer to be the first to spot a mistake in his contract. The agreement is written in seconds so you have time to read it — and nothing reaches the customer until you release it.
You counter-sign, and it becomes executed
Their signature raises an alert that you still owe a counter-signature — it does not go quiet and wait to be remembered. You sign, and the status moves to fully executed. If you have saved a signature it can sign itself.
The customer signs on Thursday. The builder means to counter-sign and does not. Three weeks later the job is framed, the money has moved, and the agreement underlying all of it was never actually executed by both parties.
A half-signed contract is a job everyone thinks is done and legally isn't. An alert that won't go quiet until you counter-sign means the agreement is executed before the money moves.
Both signatures, one document, each with its own time
No countersigned copy of a copy. One document carries the customer's signature and yours, each with its own name, date and time, and the customer's IP beneath theirs.
The builder has the version the customer signed and the customer has the version the builder signed, and they are different files with different page counts. Which one is the contract is now a genuinely open question.
Two half-signed PDFs aren't an agreement — they're an argument waiting to happen. One record with both marks and both times means there's never a question which copy is the contract.
It stays where they can find it, forever
Try itThe executed agreement lives on the customer's own page, alongside their invoices and their photos. They open it in eight months without emailing you, and you can see the status of every contract at once without opening any of them.
“Can you send me a copy of what we signed?” arrives on a Saturday, eight months on, usually because a bank or an insurer has asked for it. The builder searches his sent mail for the name, finds three attachments, and cannot tell which one was the final.
The 'can you send me what we signed?' request always comes, usually on a Saturday. Leaving the agreement permanently on the customer's page means they never have to ask and you never have to search.
- 1Customer approves the estimate in their portal.
- 2Customer fills in the information form — only the sections you switched on.
- 3The agreement is written from their answers and the approved price — the price table at the customer's prices — then locked so later edits to your wording never touch their copy.
- 4You read it in Review & Send, tweak it for this one customer if you want, and release it.
- 5Customer types their legal name, draws a signature, and initials each clause where the wording calls for it.
- 6You counter-sign. The agreement reads Fully Executed and files itself into the customer's documents.
Paperwork was the one place a sold job could sit for a week. The customer had said yes, the crew was waiting, and somebody still had to open a Word file and retype a name, an address, a price and a payment schedule. Every retype is a chance to be wrong, and a wrong number in a signed contract is the builder's problem, not the typist's. So the agreement is written from what was already approved — and what a customer signs is locked the second they sign it, so you can improve your wording next week without touching a document somebody already put their name on.
- Retyping customer name, address, price and payment terms into a template for every job
- Contracts that quietly disagree with the estimate the customer approved
- No record of when, from where, or by whom a contract was signed
- Template edits silently changing what an already-signed customer agreed to
The agreement is built from the approved estimate
Your branding, the customer's details, the site and schedule, the approved price, the payment stages, the line-item breakdown and the state notice are gathered into one set of values, and the contract is written from them. Three different actions use that same generator — first build, switching template, and pulling to the live estimate — so all three produce identical output.
