eSignature Legitimateness for Business Agreements in United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature legitimateness for Business agreements in United States

[Music] hey there it's cheryl at the made on sunday studio we talk all about branding design and creative entrepreneurship here so if those are topics of interest to you then remember to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you can get more videos from me alright so in today's video i'm going to be showing you how to create and send a digital contract so that both you and your signee can receive and sign the document all completely digitally legally and free now i know there are a lot of paid options out there like crm programs that will help you do it all automatically but it's quite expensive and they're usually a subscription service that includes all these other suite of services as well but let's just say you're just starting out your business or if you are only sending out a couple of contracts a month then i have a couple of free options for you that you can do yourself all right let's get right into the video all right so first off contracts right super important but super scary topic especially when you are first starting out in entrepreneurship or you know any kind of business where you need to work with other people with a contract now i know what you're trying to do you're probably googling around on youtube on i don't know whichever search engine you use on some sort of template or just like instructions on how to create a contract um now i can't say that i didn't do that as well a couple years ago when i started my business because you know where do you even start right but that self-written version that i created for the beginning of my business gave me so many sleepless nights worried whether it was actually legal binding if it included things that actually helped me and protected me for my business as well as for my clients like i had no idea if it was actually working at all so as i was booking more clients the more worried i would get sending out these contracts out and that's not a way to run your business because you want to be excited every time you sign a new client right so now i actually use a legally binding attorney drafted contract template from the contract shop it was super easy after i purchased it i actually purchased one that was specifically written for graphic designers and i know they have different templates for you know consultants for i think they have one for photographers and for coaches and for course creators and tons of different other more generic ones for just service providers in general as well so it was super easy i just picked the one that was for me um and then it took me maybe half an hour to an hour the first time to make sure that everything is adapted for my business um it was really easy like they told you like change this part if your business is this or that and then i would just pick this or that um and then yeah every time i send out a contract now um i just basically take five minutes to make sure that you know the price of the project or the timelines of the project are all adapted to that specific project that i'm working on or for that client and then i send it out so just so you know this is not a sponsored video i honestly just love the template i'm using i do have an affiliate link if you want to use my affiliate link i will provide that link here as well as in the description below so if you're interested in getting legally finding an attorney-drafted contract template from the contract shop i highly recommend it just even check them out trust me you will sleep better you will be more confident you will feel more professional in your business knowing that your contract is actually protecting you and your business so anyways again not sponsored but that's just the first step in creating a digitally signable contract okay so now let's say you bought your contract template you have it open now and i use um you can use like word um but i use google docs so i have it open on my google docs i've adapted everything to my business i send you know export pdf and now we need to make those form fields where it says you know your name your client's name the date it's signed as well as the signature area right and maybe you have a couple spots where they have to fill out their email address or their address or their phone number where whatever information that you need from your client you need to make all those fields fillable and then at the end signable and then have it digitally automatically sent to you sent back to you after they sign it so let's get into my laptop and i'll show you how to get that done all right so you have your document and we're going to export this into a pdf so i'm just going to go to download and pdf download and we want to make sure that your client is not going to be able to edit the document so it needs to be in a pdf format so we have um i'm just gonna download this onto my desktop because um then i can open it on pdf reader all right so there's two options for creating free electronic signatures the first way is using using pdf reader by adobe acrobat reader it's free so i'm going to put the links of this below in the description below um to download it so all you have to do is download um pdf reader and [Music] yeah you just need the free one so um this one right here is what you need um what we're trying to do is sign track and send and as you can see here um the paid version you can definitely do it but on the free version which is what we're downloading right now there's limited usage so the limited usage allows you to do two contracts for free which might be enough for a lot of people so let's open up pdf reader okay so i have my pdf document opened up here on adobe pdf reader um and if you need to um like let's say client name client address let's say you want to type that in yourself you can do that as well so go to this little symbol here which lets you sign the document it'll actually change the document into fill and sign area so you can go ahead and maybe this part makes more sense to type your name so cheryl chen and then you can type you can even like sorry right here you can move it um you can type your address name email address phone number whatever it might be that you're that you need to pre-fill out before the signature let's say these are um uh kind of fields that you want your client or your sign me to sign then you just leave those blank for now just focus on what you need to fill out yourself first all right so just get those all filled out and then the first thing like my contract looks like this um and at the very end i need to do my signature as well so i'm going to type my name here i can even type the date which is february 9th 2022 and then you can sign it yourself so you can click on sign here you can either use like there's a couple of ways to add a signature so you can either like type your name out you can draw your name out you can upload an image of your signature but i just use like the typed version because it doesn't really matter to me so i just click on it and then i drag it into my signature area and there we go you have one signature down now you need to send this document let's say everything is filled out your name everything that you need to fill out is filled out on this contract now you need to send this or tell the pdf uh document which areas need to be signed by your client so you're going to click on nyx save request signature and then get started so you can see up here that there's two left so for every 30 days you get two documents to do this so what you have to do is uh put your signers sorry this name no email address so i'm just gonna put my email address for now and then you can write a little message hi there please review the contract and sign thank you so much whatever and then specify where to sign oops i'm signed into my account okay i'm gonna use my um my gmail account all right there we go and then it's just going to process the document and now it brings me to a space where i can add fields so i can either add a couple different things here most likely you're just going to add text so let's say you want your client to put text here which is their name you want them to put text here which is their address so maybe put a bigger block here so that they have more space um their email also text so they can you can just add text boxes for them uh and then they can type in whatever they need to type there and they will get a prompt on their side that this section needs to be typed uh or filled out before they can submit the contract so that's all good now let's go to the end of the contract where we have the signatures right so again we have the client's name and then we have signatures so right here in the signature field you can actually select signature and they will get the same prompts that you saw earlier so they can either like upload their signature they can either type their signature or draw their signature tons of different options it's very easy for them and then you can just put another text input for date signed and then you're done and then you can go ahead and send the document and it will email to the email that you specified i'm not gonna click on this because i'll be sending it to myself but basically you click on send once this is all filled out and it will automatically email this fillable document to your client they will be prompted to sign all of these things and then they'll click done or like send and then that contract will actually automatically send back to you to your email address so it's super convenient and free so i hope that was um one of the great options that you can use that's legal legally binding and free alright so your second free option to create electronically signed documents or contracts is with hello sign i love them i've been using them ever since i started my business you can get an account for free so i'm gonna provide the link below in the description you can sign up for free it says try 30 days for free but you can actually just continuously use it for free um yeah so just like get an account and then uh and then you can just stay on the free account so the free account allows you to do three signed documents every 30 days um so yeah if you don't need more than three signed documents then the free account is all good so you can see as you can see here this is my account once i log in send three documents every month for free all right so we're gonna go into this sign or send section to upload your document so just go here and click on the document that you want to upload that's just going to take like a minute not even it's really fast all right so once that is uploaded you're gonna click on nyx and then you're gonna add your sign signers here so you're you you are already definitely gonna be one of the signees so you don't need to put your name but you need to put like your whoever is signing the document so i'm just going to do a random name and email address there so as you can see here you can see all of your different signees and we have jessie here which is my husband's name and also me so everyone is there so now just like previously you need to go to the document here and just add your fields so um you can either uh like sign yourself me now and you can like add your name so it's already there but anyways i'm just gonna like remove that right here um we can add my email address and you can like just add a text field so like made on sundays so it's very easy to do just as we did on adobe um and then so fill out everything that you need to fill out there's also like check boxes and other cool things that you can add there at the end you might want to add like the date in i think there's already a date signed here so now you want to add the fields that whoever you're sending the contract to will need to fill out so you go to their name here and then you're gonna add those fields so client name uh address i'm just gonna put um like a text box so that they can add their text there um and then uh client email just put some space in there um and then phone number i'm just going to add a text box and then at the very end you want to add their name again [Music] and this part is where you can add a signature so again you might want to add some more space there and then date signed so when they click this field it would go to the calendar so they can just pick a date now when you create these fields as you can see here you can format it and create like use a different font or different uh size and stuff um so uh you can just like customize it however you like and then once that is all done uh you can basically send the document so you're gonna go to nyx and it's just gonna make sure that their email is correct if anyone else needs to get a copy and then you can give it a title and a little message because they'll receive it in their emails so once you fill this out and you send for signature this is going to be emailed to them directly and they're going to see it pop up they're going to read it and fill in all of the the fields that are required and then they're going to click send and it actually one cool thing about hello sign is even if they open the document and view it without signing you will also get an email telling you that the person that you sent it to has opened the file and viewed it so even if they don't sign it yet you kind of get a peek into whether they have saw the email or looked at the contract so that's a really cool feature and then once they sign it and send it it will email to you automatically from hello sign and you'll get a signed copy which you can download and save into your records um and your contract is signed all right so that's it with those two free options to sign and send digitally binding contracts you have five free contracts that you can send out every month if you use both of those services together for a lot of business owners five contracts a month is probably more than enough even for myself i use those two free options myself for my business because i rarely send over five contracts a month so i hope that video was helpful and i hope you liked it and if you did please give this video a like and subscribe to my channel and remember to hit that notification bell as well to get updates on my latest videos alright so i hope you have a lovely rest of your day and i'll see you in the next video bye