Contracts can be annoying things, especially for those of us that try to go paperless and/or do most of our work online.
For starters, a surprising number of transactions happen with no written evidence. Whether it is because people don’t know what to put in them, they are challenging to dig up online, or they don’t want to spend the money to talk to a lawyer, many agreements go unprotected. As the saying goes, this is fine.. until it isn’t.
Even when there is a contract that needs to be signed, you then have to go through the hassle of getting the signature. A few ways that this can happen, all of them annoying:
- You email someone a PDF, they print it out, sign it, scan it back in, and email the signed copy.
- You email someone a PDF, they use an application like Adobe Acrobat to apply an image of their signature to the PDF, and they email back the signed copy.
- Worst case scenario: Someone sends you a PDF. You have to print it out, sign it, and then fax it back.
To that last point, I don’t think I could say it better than Paperless Document Organization Guide interviewee Kyle Durand on Twitter:
Fax it?! Since we must be emulating 1885, I will instead grab my musket, fill a skin with water & set off across town on my trusty steed.
To address the annoyance of dealing with contracts, the aforementioned musket-toting Kyle Durand founded OurDeal, which bills itself as having “Contracts Without Complications”.
OurDeal tackles the creation, delivery, and signing of simple legal agreements. I signed up for the free account, so let’s see what you can do with it and how it all works.
Signing Up
One thing I liked right off the bat is that once you sign up, you’re taken to a screen where you can take a tour, do a sample contract, or poke around. I wish more web services did this. Too often once you sign up, you’re just thrown into the interface and you have no idea where you’re supposed to start.
My Library
When you click on My Library, you are taken to a list of the pre-defined contracts that OurDeal has in the system.
You can view them all, or narrow down on specific categories such as Buying and Selling, Service Agreements, Business Ventures, Intellectual Property, and the like. There is even a “Fun Agreements” category which includes a Household Chores Agreement. Please don’t let my wife see that one.
Some contracts are free, and some are premium agreements. A nice touch is that if you are on the free plan, you can pay a one time fee to do one of the premium agreements. You don’t have to sign up for a subscription just to do one contract.
You can also upload your own contracts which is helpful.
You can tell which ones are the premium ones by the little seal icon beside them.
One minor nitpick about the Library. By default it shows five contracts at a time, and you need to page through them or specify 5, 10, or 20 at a time. It would be nice if it saved that pagination choice for you after you log out. Not a big deal, especially since you can save certain contracts as Favorites, but it still would be a nice to have.
Creating A Contract
Let’s go through and create a contract. I’ll try one of the free ones. Let’s try a Bill of Sale.
When you click on a contract, you view a preview of the first page where you can look through and make sure that it is the contract that you want to create. Assuming it is, you go on to the Next Step.
The next step is to fill out the details of the contract. Obviously, this will differ depending on the contract that you are creating.
After you’ve filled out the details, it will present the contract to you with your details filled in.
You then verify, and confirm that you are ready to create the legally binding agreement.
Receiving And Signing
Once you’ve created the agreement, you will see it in your My Agreements screen, with a status of Sent.
The recipient will receive an email with a link to the agreement. When they (or in this case, my imaginary friend) clicks the link, they are able to view the contract.
As the sender, you can tell that the recipient has viewed the contract because their status changes to viewed.
You can click on the status, and it will take you to a log where you can see exactly when the recipient viewed the contract.
This is a great feature. Now you don’t need to wonder if the person received it, whether it got trapped in their Spam filter, or what. Once you see they’ve viewed it, you know for sure it arrived.
After the recipient has received the contract, they have two choices. They can agree and sign the document, or reject it with comments and it will go back to you.
Just to be sure your recipent knows what they are getting themselves into, it gives this popup:
Signed Contract
Once the contract is signed, both you and the recipient will receive a PDF copy via email with the final signed contract.
As you would expect, the contract appears in your My Agreements section as Signed, where you can also download it and see the log of when it was signed.
Is All This Legal?
Obviously I am not a lawyer, though the founder of OurDeal is. Helpfully, there is a Why This Is Legal section of the FAQ.
I recommend that you read it and decide for yourself if you are comfortable with electronic signatures.
Pricing
OurDeal has 4 pricing plans ranging from free to $99 per month.
Obviously if you are going to be doing a complex legal transaction, you are probably going to want to be visiting a lawyer.
However, if you have been doing simple transactions without an agreement, and you know in the back of your mind that you should have something written, it may be worth checking out OurDeal and seeing if it works for you.
Best of all from a DocumentSnap perspective, no printing!
