Sign a Contract and Send It Back the Same Day

The contract lands at ten past four with a note asking for it back today. The traditional route is print, sign, scan, and email a crooked grey photocopy of your own signature. It works, it takes forty minutes, and it needs a printer that has toner.

None of that is necessary, and neither is a signing subscription. What it takes is ten minutes, in the order below.

Almost every contract wants an electronic signature: your handwritten mark, placed on the page, carrying the same weight as signing a printed copy and scanning it back. A small number of regulated filings want a digital signature, which is a certificate issued to you by a trusted authority and bound to the file by a hash. That is a different thing and no browser tab can produce one. The difference between the two is worth two minutes before you start, because it decides whether this route works at all.

Counterparties often send agreements password protected. Use Unlock PDF with the password they sent you, before anything else. A protected document cannot be filled, signed or flattened, and finding that out after you have placed twelve fields is a bad afternoon.

1. 1

   Open the contract

   Load it into the editor. The document is opened and re-exported in your browser; there is no upload and no server copy.

2. 2

   Let the field scan go first

   It merges form widgets already in the file, boxes and underlines drawn on the page, and the text labels beside them. The mechanism is rule based rather than learned, so it is reliably good at ruled boxes and reliably poor at a blank line with no label.

3. 3

   Correct the suggestions

   Move the box that landed on the clause number, widen the address field, delete the one it put on the header.

4. 4

   Draw the signature once

   Mouse, trackpad, finger or stylus. New signatures export as vector strokes, so there is no paper-coloured rectangle sitting on the signing line.

5. 5

   Place it everywhere it is needed

   Initials on every page and the full signature at the end, resized to the line each one sits on, plus the date fields beside them.

• Read the whole document at normal zoom. A field you dragged two millimetres can sit outside its box.
• Check the initial line on every page, including the schedule nobody reads.
• Use Flatten PDF if the recipient should not be able to edit the values you entered. It bakes the current appearances into the page.
• Add a password with Protect PDF only if they can open one, and only after everything else. Send the password by another channel.

Then open the exported file once yourself, as an ordinary attachment, before you attach it to the reply. It is thirty seconds and it catches the signature that ended up on page four.