Nothing is sent without a template. The Template Gallery is the set of documents your organisation can produce, and building it is the one-time work that makes everything afterwards fast.
Four kinds
A template declares what sort of record it belongs to.
| Type | Built against |
|---|---|
| Deal | An opportunity in Sales |
| Employee | A person in HR |
| Vendor | A supplier |
| Custom | Anything else |
This is not a label. It decides which fields are available when you author it and where the template can be sent from later. A deal template offers deal fields and appears on deal records; an employee template offers employment fields and appears on people.
Choose it first and choose it correctly. Changing it later means revisiting every field you placed.
The gallery itself
Cards rather than a list, each showing what the template is for and what state it is in.
Two things are worth reading before you pick one: the type, which tells you what record it will be sent from, and whether it is draft or active, since a draft cannot be sent by anybody.
Search works on the name, which is the argument for naming them after the job rather than after a version number.
Two ways to build one
Upload a PDF
The usual route for anything your lawyers wrote. Upload the finished document and place fields on top of it.
The wording stays exactly as approved, which is the whole point: nobody wants a contract re-typed into a builder. What you are adding is where the values and signatures go.
Author it in the editor
For documents you own end to end: simple agreements, letters, internal forms. Written and laid out in the platform, with fields placed as you go.
Faster to change and the right choice when the wording is yours rather than counsel's.
Both end up in the same place and behave identically once published.
Draft and active
A template has a status, and only one of them can be sent.
Draft means work in progress. Fields and bindings are saved, and it will not appear in any send panel.
Active means published and live.
The transition happens through a short wizard rather than a save button, because publishing a template is a decision rather than a keystroke. That wizard is covered in the piece on sending, since it settles who signs and for how long the link lasts.
Keeping something in draft while you work on it is the correct habit. A half-finished template that is technically sendable will eventually be sent.
Where a template can be used
Part of publishing is choosing which record surfaces it appears on.
That is what stops the send panel on a deal offering forty templates when three are relevant. A person sending a contract should see the contracts, not the whole gallery.
Be restrictive. It is easy to add a surface later and much harder to notice that people are scrolling past twenty irrelevant options every day.
What a good template set looks like
Small. Most organisations need between five and fifteen. If you are heading for fifty, some of them are variations that fields should be handling instead.
Named for the job. "Standard services agreement" beats "SA v3 final". People pick from this list under time pressure.
One per real variation. Two templates that differ only by a paragraph are better as one template with a conditional block or a field.
Reviewed once a year. Templates rot quietly. A clause everybody stopped agreeing to eighteen months ago is still being sent.
A sensible first set
For most organisations, four templates cover the large majority of what gets sent.
A services or sales agreement, from a deal.
An NDA, which is short and gets sent more than anything else.
An offer letter, from a person.
A supplier agreement, from a vendor.
Build those, use them for a month, and let the gaps tell you what the fifth should be. A gallery designed in advance is always wrong in both directions: it contains things nobody sends and misses the thing everybody needs.
Retiring a template
Templates that are no longer used should be taken out of the gallery rather than left in it.
The cost of leaving them is not storage, it is choice. A send panel offering an obsolete agreement alongside the current one is a mistake waiting to be made under time pressure, and the person making it will be somebody who joined after the old one stopped being correct.
Documents already sent from a retired template are unaffected. Retiring stops future sends and changes nothing historical.
Who should own this
Templates are administrative rather than everyday, and the permission reflects that: authoring needs a higher level of access than sending.
The arrangement that works is one owner per template family. Legal owns the contracts, HR owns the offers, and everybody else sends what those two published. A gallery that anybody can edit becomes a gallery nobody trusts.
Versioning, and what to do about it
There is no version history on a template. Editing one changes it for everything sent afterwards.
Documents already sent are unaffected. They were generated from the template as it stood, and they keep what they were given. Changing a template never rewrites an executed agreement, which is the property that matters.
For a substantive change to wording, the safer pattern is a new template rather than an edit, with the old one retired. That way anybody looking at a signed contract from March can still see which version produced it.
For a typo, just fix it.
Cloud imports
Templates can be brought in from Google Drive or OneDrive as well as from your machine, using whichever your organisation has connected.
Useful mostly for the realistic case: the approved contract lives in a shared drive, owned by somebody in legal, and the version you want is the one they last touched rather than the copy in your downloads folder.
Before you build twenty
Build one, send it to yourself, and sign it. End to end, thirty minutes.
You will find things that no amount of planning surfaces: a field that resolves to nothing, a signature block in the wrong place, a validity that is too short. Finding them on a template nobody has used costs nothing. Finding them on the fifth real customer costs a good deal more.
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