Many service businesses like to include a document outlining certain terms and conditions along with their estimates. Fielder offers a Contract Template feature that lets you set up these documents once, so you can easily reuse them for multiple estimates. Providing these documents along with your estimates can be helpful for clearly setting expectations with your customers. This article will explain how to set up a contract template and use it in an estimate.

A contract template is a standalone document that can be injected into any estimate. It can include placeholders that will be resolved with data from the estimate it is injected into. To create a contract template, first click the "Settings" menu item on the left navigation bar. Then click the Templates button.

Next, click the "Contract templates" button:

If your organization doesn't yet have any contract templates set up, you'll see the following screen. Click the "Add" button so you can set up your first contract template.

Now you should see a simple form like in the screenshot below. You simply need to give your new contract template a name and then provide the content.

The content field is a rich text editor. This just means it is a text field that gives you lots of different formatting options. You can use the toolbar at the top to apply a different font, size, color, or alignment to a block of selected text. You can also insert placeholders into your template. Placeholders will be replaced with data from the context in which you use the template. For example, if you insert the "Customer name" placeholder in the template and then use the template in an estimate, then that placeholder will be replaced with the actual customer name for the estimate.

To insert a placeholder, first move the cursor to where you want the placeholder to go in the document. Then click the "Insert placeholder" menu in the toolbar (the last button on the right):

This menu gives you several different options for placeholders you can insert into your document:

When you insert a placeholder in your document, it will appear as text surrounded by square brackets.

To remove a placeholder, simply click on it and press the delete key on your keyboard. When you click on it, the entire placeholder will be selected. You can apply custom styling to placeholders too. To style a placeholder, you need to click on it first so that it is selected. When it is selected, it will have a blue background. Then you can apply any of the formatting options from the toolbar to it. In the following screenshot, we have applied a different font to the selected "Customer name" placeholder. We also made it larger, bold and underlined, and changed it's color to blue:

You can get a rough idea of how your document will look for your customer by using the "Preview with sample data" toggle on the bottom right. Turning this toggle on will render your document with any placeholders replaced with sample data:

Turn the toggle off to go back to edit mode. When you're done editing your document click the "Save template" button. You should see a new entry in the "Contract templates" list screen.

If you need to create more templates or edit or delete an existing template, you can return to this screen. To edit an existing template, just click the pencil icon for that template. Similarly, click the trash icon for a template entry if you want to delete it:

Now that you've created a contract template, it's time to use it in an estimate. The process is simple. The estimate form has a "Contract" section that allows you to select a contract template to use. The "Contract" section is at the bottom of the estimate form. Unless you have a really tall monitor, you will probably have to scroll down to find it. Click the "Select contract template" button in the right side of the toolbar for the contract field. Then select the template you want to apply:

The selected template's content will be copied into the estimate's "Contract" field. Any placeholders in the template will be resolved with appropriate data for the estimate. In the following screenshot, I selected the "Standard Estimate Agreement" template I created earlier. Notice how the placeholders have been replaced with data from the estimate:

The selected template's content was copied into your estimate's "Contract" field. You can make any necessary adjustments to it here, without affecting the original template. You can also modify or delete the original contract template without affecting any existing estimates that use it.

Let's click the "Save" button and then pull up the PDF rendering of our estimate to see how the contract will ultimately look for our customer:

Looks good to me! Now I'm ready to send this estimate off to my customer.

If you're been using Fielder prior to the release of this "Contract Template" feature, you may have set up your estimate contracts/disclaimers/terms using the Footer Title and Footer Body fields. The contract feature is intended to replace the Footer Title and Footer Body fields, and is much more versatile. However, if you have existing estimates with non-empty Footer Title and Footer Body fields, then those fields will still appear. If you clear those fields out for an existing estimate and click the save button, then those fields will no longer appear for that estimate. Those fields will not appear for new estimates or for existing estimates for which those fields were not being used.

If you have any other questions, or need a hand creating a contract template, reach out in the Messenger and our support team will be happy to help! 😎