They sign it on their phone. The job is set up before you get back to the truck.

Create a proposal from any estimate. Add a cover letter, the scope of work, inclusions, exclusions and your terms and conditions, and pick how much of the price the client sees: the total only, a price per section, or every line.

Your standing terms live in Settings, under the company profile, and are copied onto each new proposal. Change them on one job without touching the rest. Once a proposal is created, editing your standing terms next month does not rewrite a document the client already has.

The client opens a link, in any phone or computer browser, with no account to make. They see your logo, the scope, the price at the detail you chose, each tax as its own figure, and your GST/HST and PST/RST/QST registration numbers as they stood when you sent it.

Any optional lines show as add-ons they can tick, and the total updates as they do. They sign by typing their name, or decline with a reason. Ridgepole records the name, the time, and the address and browser it was signed from.

The proposal moves to Viewed when the client opens it. It carries a valid-until date: you get a warning three days before it expires, and after that date the link stops accepting a signature.

When the client signs, Ridgepole does in one step what usually takes an evening of retyping. If any part fails, none of it happens, so you never get half a job.

• A new active job, with the contract sum before tax, including the add-ons they ticked
• A budget category for each estimate section, holding your cost as the budget and the section’s price as its line on the contract for progress billing
• The job’s document folders, and a client portal if the client gave an email address
• The estimate marked converted and the lead marked won
• The office told in Ridgepole and by email, so nobody creates the same job twice by hand

Some clients sign printed proposals and pay by cheque. Print the proposal, and when it comes back signed, record it by hand: who signed, the date on the paper, which add-ons they ticked, and a scan of the signed copy if you have one. The scan is filed in the job’s Contracts folder.

A proposal recorded that way builds the job exactly as an online signature does, and the PDF says it was signed on paper and who recorded it. The job is marked as a paper client, so Ridgepole asks before emailing them anything, and their invoices say who to make the cheque out to unless you have written your own payment instructions.

Prices change before a client signs. Revise the estimate and the old proposal’s link stops working at once, so the client cannot sign last week’s number. A proposal that was sent can be voided with a reason, and nothing about it is deleted.