Agreements

Read time 10 min Level Intermediate Prerequisites Your organisation has Time Recording switched on

In a nutshell: Agreements live on the Account Management board. Columns walk a deal from Planning through Draft and Pending Signature into Signed, with a Closed column you switch on when you need history. New Agreement creates one from a handful of fields; Plan Engagement forecasts the work before there is a contract; and a deal handed over from the Sales Pipeline arrives in Planning on its own. Build the quote from line items, generate the PDF, send for e-signature, then record the signed copy.

What you will learn

Where the agreement board is, and when it is not in your menu.
The columns on the board and what each one means.
The three ways an agreement gets created.
What lives inside an agreement, and why the numbered steps are not on screen when you open one.
How to generate quotes and PDFs, send for e-signature and record the signed copy.
What actually has to be filled in before you can send -- and what does not.

The mental model: one board, one purpose

Open Account Management. In business mode it sits on the BUSINESS menu; in campaign mode it sits on the PLAN menu instead. Either way it only appears when your organisation has Time Recording switched on, and it is not in the menu at all in pitch or report mode. If you cannot see it, ask your account owner whether Time Recording is on.

The page does one job: it is the agreement board. Every commercial agreement -- retainer, project, signed and unsigned -- flows through this single surface. There is no settings tab here any more; see Where the defaults live below.

Cards move left to right as the deal firms up. You do not drag them: a card moves itself as you do the work.

Planning -- forecast and plan before drafting. There is no agreement document yet.
Draft -- the agreement is being prepared.
Pending Signature -- sent for client signature.
Signed -- currently running.
Closed -- finished work: completed, lost, cancelled or archived. This column is hidden until you turn on Show closed, so the board opens on live work only.

Above the board sit four expiry stat cards -- Expired, Expiring 30d, Expiring 90d and Signed, no end date. Click one to see the agreements behind it. You can hide the strip and bring it back with Show stats.

Under the stat cards is a single Search agreements... box, which matches the whole of a card -- client, service, value, dates, status -- across every column at once. Directly beneath it, on one row just above the columns, sit the Show closed switch on the left and a Sort dropdown on the right that re-orders cards within each column.

[Screenshot placeholder -- Account Management: New Agreement and Plan Engagement buttons top-right, the four expiry stat cards, the search box, then the board with columns Planning / Draft / Pending Signature / Signed, and the Show closed switch and Sort dropdown between them.]

The agreement board. New Agreement and Plan Engagement sit in the page header; Show closed reveals the Closed column.

How an agreement is created

Three routes:

New Agreement (page header). The short route. Pick the client, name the agreement, choose the service, set the start date and the duration, then Create agreement. Buzzscribed creates the plan and the agreement document together and drops you straight onto the Essentials screen, with the card sitting in Draft. This route asks for no hours -- forecasting lives on the planning steps -- but it does start the quote for you. If the service you pick carries a standard price, the window says so before you create anything ("Starts the quote with ... You can edit it.") and that becomes the first line on the quote, priced and charged the way the service list defines it. A service with no standard price seeds nothing and the quote starts empty. Either way the first line is a starting point, not an agreed figure: open the quote and check it before you generate or send anything.
Plan Engagement (page header). Forecast first. It creates a plan with no agreement behind it, which appears in the Planning column so you can hold capacity and shape the work. Set up the agreement later. The same choice is offered inside New Agreement as Plan and forecast first.
From the Sales Pipeline. When a salesperson moves a deal into the Handover column and fills in the Send to Account Manager form, a provisional card lands in your Planning column carrying the handover notes. Those cards show Plan and Send Back to Sales until you take them on. Sales Pipeline is a business-mode screen and needs the prospecting feature switched on.

A Planning card carries a small badge saying where it came from: Speculative (a capacity hold with no client commitment), Sold - Planning (sales handed it over), AM-Initiated (created here, from a verbal commitment or a renewal) or Revising (pushed back from Draft for a scope revision).

Inside an agreement

Once an agreement document exists -- so anything in Draft, Pending Signature, Signed or Closed -- opening the card lands you on the Essentials screen, and the numbered step row is not on screen at all. A few shortcuts jump past it to the step they are about: Track Signature on a Pending Signature card and Send Reminder in the card menu open at Send, and Add Addendum, Reduce Value and Purchase Order open at Team & costs. Everything else opens on Essentials. Two pills sit above the cards:

Essentials -- everything a contract needs on one screen: Client & Billing, Billing Location & Tax, Terms and dates, the quote and its line items, the Account Team card with the Key Contact, and the send actions. This is where the short route lands you, and where an ordinary open lands.
All steps -- click this to bring the numbered steps back. Everything that is not on Essentials lives here: the campaign brief, the Rate Card, Purchase Orders, Contract Addendums, and the Generate Quote card with PDF Quote and PDF SOW.

The steps you get after clicking All steps depend on the card. On an agreement that already has a document there are five, relabelled and renumbered: Agreement, Pricing, Brief, Team & costs, Send. A card still in Planning has no document yet, so it opens on the full seven-step view instead, split into two phases by a Start Agreement gate: steps 1 and 2, Basics & Service and Forecast & Work, are planning and mint nothing for the client, then steps 3 to 7 are the agreement itself.

Because the labels change, this article names each step by what it holds. The number is never a reliable route -- follow the label.

Client & Terms (labelled Agreement once the document exists): The commercial frame: the bill-to details, Billing Location & Tax (which sets the currency and the tax treatment), dates and payment terms. All three cards are on Essentials too.
Quote (labelled Pricing once the document exists): The Quote Details card and the line-item table that drives the money. Add Line Item for a fresh row; Pull from Planning brings lines across from the planning data. These lines are what the client-facing quote and the formal agreement render from, and they start seeded -- from the service's standard price on the short route, or from your planned hours and budget when the agreement was started from a plan. Check them before you send. The Quote Details card and its line items are on Essentials; the Generate Quote card holding PDF Quote and PDF SOW is not, so click All steps and open Pricing to reach those two.
Brief: A collapsible Campaign Brief card -- target audience, objectives and key messages that drive delivery once work starts, with a badge showing whether it has been filled in. It is not on Essentials: click All steps and open Brief. Useful, but it never blocks the agreement.
Team & Costs (labelled Team & costs once the document exists): The Account Team card, where you set the Key Contact (required), plus the Rate Card, the Purchase Orders card and the Contract Addendums card. Only the Account Team card is on Essentials; the other three need All steps. Addendums handle changes to the contract value after signing, each with its own terms, line items and signing flow.
Agreement (labelled Send once the document exists): The document itself: PDF Agreement, Send for E-Signature, Upload Signed, and the signing history once it is under way. All of this is on Essentials.

Purchase orders are external supplier spend tied to this agreement. The quickest route is the card's three-dot menu on the board: on a signed agreement, Purchase Order opens the agreement at Team & costs with the form already up. Otherwise open the agreement, click All steps, open Team & costs and click Add Purchase Order. Pick the supplier, add a description and the amount. Adding and removing one are both open to any signed-in user, and neither is locked after signing, so a cost can still be corrected once work is under way.

A Planning & forecast link sits at the right-hand end of the same pill row and reveals the planning steps on an agreement that is already past the gate. Changing them does not change the contract.

Quote, agreement, and signing

Generate a quote. PDF Quote and PDF SOW produce the early-stage documents you would send to win the work. They are not on the Essentials screen: click All steps, then Pricing, and they are in the Generate Quote card at the bottom.
Generate the formal agreement. PDF Agreement produces the contract document. It is on Essentials, in the Agreement Actions card, so there is nothing to click through to.
Send for e-signature. Send for E-Signature opens the send screen, where you format the document and add a personal message on top of the standard e-sign email. You choose how long the signing link stays valid -- 1 day, 7, 14, 30, 60, 90 days or never -- pre-set to your organisation's default, which is 30 days unless it has been changed. Sending moves the card to Pending Signature.
Track it. The E-Signature in Progress card shows who it went to, when it was sent and when it expires, with Resend, Upload Signed and Cancel signing request. Cancelling stops the link working and returns the agreement to Draft so you can change it and send again. There is also a Send Reminder shortcut on the card's three-dot menu once a request has been sent.
Record the signed copy. Upload Signed records a copy signed on paper and moves the card to Signed. The Signed Agreement card then offers both the Original and the Signed versions for download.

The client signs on the e-signature page reached by the link in the signing email -- one page for the agreement, a separate one for each addendum.

What has to be filled in before you can send

If one of the buttons in the Agreement Actions card looks dimmed, a message under them says what is missing. On the Essentials screen it simply names the missing fields, because they are all on that one screen anyway; in the step view it names each incomplete step instead and links you straight to it.

PDF Agreement and Send for E-Signature need all three of the following:

Billing details (Client & Billing and Billing Location & Tax): company name, contact person, address, state, country, ABN or company number, email, and the billing location.
Key Contact on the Account Team card.
At least one line item on the quote.

Upload Signed is lighter: it only needs at least one line item. If it is dimmed, its tip reads "Add line items first".

The campaign brief is not one of these. An empty brief never stops you generating an agreement or sending it for signature.

Once an agreement has been signed, all three buttons -- PDF Agreement, Send for E-Signature and Upload Signed -- are locked. A signed agreement is terminal. Bill more work with an addendum instead.

Try this: Click New Agreement, pick a client, name it "Test retainer" and choose a service. Before you click create, read the line under the service -- if it says the quote will start with a priced line, that is what you are about to get. Create it, then on the Essentials screen look at the quote: correct the seeded line, or add one of your own with a description, a unit cost and a quantity, and watch the totals update. Then read the message under the send buttons to see what is still missing.

The three-dot menu on a card

The menu changes with the state of the card.

Before it is signed: Promote to Engagement (speculative cards only), Plan Resources, Edit Details, Send Reminder (only once a signing request has gone out), then Mark as Lost, Archive, and -- where there is something to act on -- Unlink Agreement and Delete Plan. Close is deliberately not offered on a Draft or Pending Signature card -- nothing has been delivered, so there is nothing to mark complete. It does appear on a Planning card, and on one already sitting in Closed, and it sends you to Service Delivery in Engagement Hub, which is where closing is actually done.
Once it is signed: Edit, Add Addendum, Reduce Value, Purchase Order, Open Engagement Hub and Write Off. Archive and Mark as Lost are not there at all -- a signed deal is already won.

Archiving and marking lost are one-way from this board. There is no restore button. A closed agreement is never deleted and you can always find and read it, but it will not come back to the live columns. To find one, turn on Show closed and, for an older one, type into the search box -- with Show closed on, the search reaches the whole closed history rather than only the cards on screen. Open it with View.

Where the defaults live

Agreement configuration is no longer part of this page. The service list, what each service includes and its standard price, and the dropdown option lists that appear across the agreement form, all live on the admin setup screen under Services & Pricing and Agreement Dropdowns. Those are owner-level screens and only appear in business or campaign mode.

There is a shortcut: in the New Agreement window, under Service, an Edit service standards link opens the service list directly. It only shows for people allowed to edit the service list; opening the screen it leads to still needs account owner access.

Retainer and project fees themselves are not defaults -- they live on the agreement, in the Quote line items.

Quick reference

Account Management is on the BUSINESS menu in business mode, the PLAN menu in campaign mode, and only when Time Recording is on.
Columns: Planning → Draft → Pending Signature → Signed, plus Closed behind the Show closed switch.
Three ways in: New Agreement, Plan Engagement, or a Handover from the Sales Pipeline.
Editor views: Essentials (one screen, where every agreement with a document opens) or All steps -- five relabelled steps on an agreement that has a document, seven in two phases on a Planning card. Follow the step label, never a number.
Not on Essentials, so they need All steps: the campaign brief, PDF Quote and PDF SOW, the Rate Card, Purchase Orders and Contract Addendums.
The quote is seeded when the agreement is created -- from the service's standard price, or from the plan. Check it before you send.
PDF Agreement and Send for E-Signature are gated on billing details, Key Contact and at least one line item; Upload Signed only on a line item. The campaign brief is never a blocker.
Send for E-Signature → Pending Signature; Upload Signed → Signed. Signing links default to 30 days.
Archive and Mark as Lost are one-way. Show closed plus the search box is how you find finished work.

Key takeaways

One board holds every state of every agreement, and the card moves itself as you work.
Planning is for forecasting; the Start Agreement gate is the moment a client-facing document exists.
Build the quote from line items, generate the PDF, send for signature, record the signed copy.
Closing an agreement off this board cannot be undone, so read the confirmation before you accept it.