Sending a contract

Write it once. It fills itself in for every client after that, and she signs it on her phone in about forty seconds.

About 10 minutes to read · 20 minutes to set up your first one

Step oneWrite the agreement

Go to Templates and choose the Contracts tab. Make a new one, give it a name you’ll recognise in a list — Maternity Agreement, Newborn Session — and paste or type your wording into the big box.

If your contract already exists in Word, paste the words in. It won’t bring the bold and headings with it — that box holds plain text — so you’ll add those back with the buttons above it. Two minutes, and then you never do it again.

Making it look like a document

The toolbar above the box does the work: H1, H2 and H3 for headings, bold, underline, italic, bullets, and centre. Select your words and press the button.

If you’d rather type the marks directly, they’re these:

Type this	You get
# Photography Agreement	A big heading
## Booking & retainer	A heading
### Rescheduling	A smaller heading
**non-refundable**	Bold
__please read__	Underlined
- one thing	A bullet point
-> centred <-	Centred on the page

The marks come in pairs. **bold** needs the stars at both ends — leave one off and the stars print onto the page as stars.

Fields that fill themselves in

Instead of typing a client’s name, type {client_first}. When you send it, that becomes her actual name. Same for {client_name}, {session_date}, {studio_name}, {today} and the rest — there’s a row of them you can tap to drop in.

This is the bit that turns one document into every document. Write it once with fields, and it’s correct for every client forever.

Step twoThe two special ones

These are worth knowing, because they’re what makes an agreement in MSB better than a PDF someone signs and emails back.

{initials} — make her initial a specific clause

Put {initials} on its own line underneath any clause you want acknowledged individually, and she gets a small box to initial in exactly that spot.

She can’t sign until every one is filled. If she misses one, we tell her so and won’t let it through. And you’ll see what she wrote on your copy.

Use it for the clauses that cause arguments later: the retainer being non-refundable, the late-arrival policy, what happens if a baby simply refuses to sleep.

{consent} — ask her a real question

Type {consent:Use of your images} and she gets a genuine Yes or No she has to answer.

Either answer lets her sign. She is allowed to say no — that’s the entire point of asking. Her answer is saved on her client record, so months later, when you’re looking for something to post at eleven at night, MSB knows.

Step threeSend it to yourself first

At the top of the contract editor there’s Send me a test. Press it.

It emails you the agreement exactly as your client receives it — same email, same rendering, landing in a real inbox on a real phone. It’s filled in with a made-up client called Jane Sample so you can check your fields worked, and your initial and consent boxes are drawn in so you can see where they’ll sit.

Nothing is saved and nobody but you is emailed. It takes ten seconds and it is the single best habit you can build here. Do it before every real send until you trust the thing.

There’s also Preview, which shows you the same document without leaving the page. Use Preview while you’re writing, and the test email when you think you’re finished.

Step fourGet it to your client

Three ways, and they suit different moments.

Send to a client. Open the agreement in Templates and press Send to a client. Pick who it’s going to, and optionally which session it belongs to. Her details fill in and it lands in her client space with an email telling her it’s waiting. No workflow involved. This is the one you’ll use most.

You can also reach it from a client’s profile — there’s a Send contract step in the journey checklist on every client — and either way you choose which agreement is going out.

A workflow step. Attach the contract to an email step in a workflow, and it goes out on its own every time you apply that workflow to a session. Set it up once and you stop thinking about contracts entirely.

Mini sessions. If you run minis, clients sign as they grab their slot — the booking and the agreement happen in the same breath.

Step fiveWhat she does

She opens her link, reads the agreement, fills in any initial boxes, answers any consent question, types her full name, and taps Sign. On a phone, in about forty seconds.

Then it’s done. You’ll see it signed on her profile, with her name and the date, and you can view or print it whenever you need it.

Two thingsWorth understanding properly

A sent contract is a photograph, not a window

The moment you send an agreement, MSB takes a copy of it exactly as it was and puts that copy in her client space. It is frozen at that moment.

Which means: editing your template later does not change a contract that has already gone out. This surprises everybody once. It’s deliberate — you would not want a document someone is about to sign quietly changing under them, and you would certainly not want last week’s edit rewriting an agreement from March.

You can amend one before it’s signed

If a client asks for a change before signing, you don’t have to start again. On any sent-but-unsigned contract there’s Amend. It opens her actual copy and lets you edit it in place. Only her copy changes — your template stays exactly as you wrote it.

Every amendment is kept. A History button appears showing what it said before and the day it changed, print-ready. If anyone ever asks, you have the answer rather than a memory.

Once she’s signed, that’s the end of it. The button disappears and the change is refused underneath as well, so nothing can be written over what she agreed to. If something needs to change after signing, send a new contract and keep the signed one on file.