How Creating Professional Contracts Can Streamline Your Small Business and Boost Your Brand

You’ve done the work and completed the job, as per your end of the agreement. Yet when providing an invoice to your client, you’re hit with pushback, denial and sometimes even silence.

Another deal gone bad, and more money out of your pocket.

For most businesses, creating a professional contract is one of the most effective ways to protect their hard-earned money. But the image of a team of lawyers fussing over legal-speak is intimidating, and has prevented more than a few business owners and consultants from protecting themselves.

Now, that’s changing.

Positively Professional

When it comes to contracts there is one thing that can spur confidence in ways nothing else can – professionalism. A professional contract is effective in furthering your brand and fosters trust with your customers. The last thing you want is to drive away clients with hand-scribbled changes or hard-to-format Word documents. Square makes it easy to create well-designed, professional contracts to share with your clients.

Square Contracts pulls your contacts directly from your Customer Directory so you don’t have to worry about misspelling a name or email address. You can also add your business name and choose an icon or colour that is suited to your brand.

Building Blocks

Even the most professional-looking contracts are not worth much if they’re hard to create. The easier it is for you to understand your contracts, the easier it will be for your clients.

With Square Contracts, creating your own contract is simple. For those who need a little support we provide several templates to choose from, ranging from confirmation of delivery to COVID-19 waivers. Plus, it’s easy to include or remove clauses to customize the contract you’re creating.

If you’re comfortable creating your own contract from scratch, you can quickly add your own clauses, save them and use them later in other contracts. For example, if you have a return policy that you want to pull into all your contracts, you can simply save it as a reusable clause.

Money Saved

A dollar saved is a dollar earned, and that’s no exception for businesses using contracts. In one year alone, Square Contracts managed to protect over $43,000,000 of our sellers’ money—in fact, Square has saved sellers $330 million since 2011 by managing and winning their disputes for them.
Here’s how:

Dispute Protection

When it comes to money, a milligram of prevention is worth more than a kilo of cure. That’s why we’re proactive in making sure that our sellers are protected from any possible disputes or chargebacks they might experience.

Without a signed contract, a seller is 2 times more likely to lose a non-fraud dispute. Card networks like Visa and Mastercard determine what is and isn’t accepted as sufficient evidence. That’s why we used our disputes expertise to design Square Contracts in a way that helps increase the odds that disputes will be resolved in your favour. When disputes do happen, we’ll automatically upload your associated contract as evidence and send it to the bank.

Document Tracking

Losing business documents is more than just annoying … it’s costly. Especially if those documents are important receipts, memos or contracts. Thankfully, digital tracking is often much easier and more reliable than traditional paper trails.

Paper can be easily lost, stolen, destroyed in an unfortunate flood or fire or just simply fade with time. With digital documents, it’s easy to keep track of your contracts and provide or restrict access to those you trust.

Square also takes care of handling the security and privacy of all the documents uploaded to our world-class secure payments platform. So unlike keeping an important document in a drawer under lock and key, you can rest easy knowing that your money – and your documents – are always safe.

Money Made

Imagine you’re a seller running a wedding dress creation business. You’re using one platform to secure appointments, another one to send out contracts and get signatures and yet another platform to send an invoice or receive a payment.

It’s a lot of work, and it’s exhausting.

Square Contracts streamlines all those different areas of your business so you never have to keep track of more than you need to. Here’s how:

Appointments to Signature

Setting up your appointments is already easy. But with Contracts + Appointments, you can add an extra touch of personality by syncing the name on the appointment to the contract and digitally sending it to your recipient. If your business involves some aspect of legal liability and needs a waiver, you can include that in your appointment booking as well.

Once the appointment is booked, your contract will land in the recipient’s inbox, along with their appointment, within seconds.

Signature to Payment

Even without a global pandemic hastening the move to electronic interfaces, the benefits of digital signatures are clear. They’re easier, faster, safer and more secure. Payments should work the same way.

Using Square, a customer can digitally sign their contract and instantly pay using the contract itself, or an associated Square invoice.

Reducing the friction between when a person signs the contract and when they have to pay it increases the chances of you getting your money on time, without having to chase anyone down for payments. But in the event that you do need to chase someone down, you can quickly send a reminder to your recipient that as per your agreement, it’s time to pay the bill.

Building a contract doesn’t have to be a headache. With Square Contracts it’s fast, easy and effective. You can quickly create professional contracts, send them off for a digital signature and receive payments before you’ve even finished your morning coffee.

Ready to create a contract? No credit card. No monthly fees. No surprises.