"I will now ask you a long series of questions and you just fill in the blanks. What's that you say? You don't like filling in forms?!"
Well, chances are your clients don't either. That's why we designed the Contracts in ShootQ to fill in those blanks for both of you. Any place you used to have a blank in your physical contract will now have a Variable which will auto-populate the correct information from ShootQ, leaving you and your client to simply sign the contract digitally and check a box to acknowledge that you read and understand it. It's really that easy, so let's get started entering your contract right now!
You will create a new Contract in:
Settings > Contracts
Start by clicking on the New Contract button.
This will open the full Contract Interface and you can now Name your Contract and begin entering information. Your client will never see the name of your contract; it is for your purposes only.
The Toolbar allows you to customize various aspects of the Contract. The first sections give you basic control over the appearance of the text of the contract (Bold, Italics and Underline), and the ability to modify font, font size, and font color. There are also three justification options for text and images.
The next section allows you three options for advanced customization (Hyperlinks, Insert Images and the Paste from Word). You can also add bulleted and numbered lists to your contract.
To insert a Hyperlink just highlight the text you would like to represent the link, press the Hyperlink button and type the link URL into the resulting pop-up window.
You can also add any web-hosted image to the contract simply by positioning the cursor where you want the image to appear, clicking on the Image button and typing the image's URL into the resulting pop-up window. Although you can't upload an image from your desktop, this feature will allow you to grab any image that is hosted online (that belongs to you, of course) and add it to your contract. Just Control click (for Mac users) or right click (for Windows folks) on the image to copy the image URL and you're all set. You can then resize the image once it is in the contract interface, by clicking on it and using the corners to adjust the size it will display.
The Paste From Word option is there if you are going to be pasting in your contract from its previous home in a Microsoft Word file or a similar program. When you copy from a word processing program like Word, your copy can carry formatting information which will appear as jumbled computer code when pasted into ShootQ. So, if you are copying from a word processor, just click on the Paste From Word option and paste your contract into the resulting pop-up window. This will strip all of that formatting out of the contract so that you can get your contract looking official in no time. If you are copying your contract from a Text or Notepad file, you can simply paste it into the large white window.
Now its time to ditch the blanks and get some Variables in that contract of yours.
You can plug in all kinds of information into the Contract template using Variables.
Eventually, you will have a contract that might look something like this:
Then, when the client picks a package and is ready to sign the contract, ShootQ will fill in all the shoot details so they will simply need to review and accept the agreement. You can also use this contract for multiple clients without having to recreate it every time.
The contract will then be added to a proposal when booking a client. ShootQ will automatically create a field on the proposal to sign the contract; there is no need to add a signature line to the contract itself. The ISP address and time/date stamp will automatically
You can also Duplicate and Delete contracts if necessary. And finally, there is a Preview button which will allow you to see how the contract will read to a client (sample variable information is also included).
As always, we recommend that you consult an attorney prior to utilizing a contract to make sure the wording is sufficient to be legally-binding. Legal advice may seem pricey now, but it is worth every penny if you get sued.
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