Design contracts: sending, signing, and getting paid.

Most contract problems in design work aren’t breaches; they’re ambiguities. The client believed revisions were unlimited, the studio believed three rounds; the client believed the fee covered procurement, the studio billed it hourly. A good agreement is less a legal shield than a shared memory of what was promised. This guide covers what that document should hold, how to get it signed without friction, and how to wire it to the money. (One plain disclaimer: this is workflow guidance, not legal advice — have a lawyer review your template once, then reuse it.)

What the contract should cover

• Scope, by phase. Which rooms, which services, which deliverables — and how many revision rounds before changes bill separately.
• Fees and the payment schedule. The fee structure (flat, hourly, or hybrid), the deposit, and exactly what triggers each subsequent invoice. The schedule belongs in the contract, not in a later conversation — our guide to deposits and balances covers the common structures.
• Procurement terms. Whether the studio sells product or advises on it, how product is priced to the client, when product payments are due, and who bears freight, storage, and damage risk.
• Reimbursable expenses. Travel, mileage, shipping, printing — what passes through, and at what rate.
• Project communication. Where the project officially lives (many studios name the client portal), and expected response windows.
• Photography and credit.The studio’s right to photograph and publish the finished work.
• Pause and exit.What happens when the project stalls, the client goes quiet, or either side wants out — and what’s owed at that point.

Sending it without losing momentum

The window between “yes, let’s work together” and a signed agreement is where projects evaporate. Two habits shorten it. First, send the contract immediately after the verbal yes — same day, while enthusiasm is high. Second, send it alongside the deposit invoice rather than ahead of it, so signing and paying are one errand, not two. Studios that run a client portal often place the agreement there as the project’s first artifact, which also establishes where everything afterward will live.

Signing

Electronic signatures are legally recognized for agreements like these in the United States under the federal ESIGN Act (and in the EU under eIDAS), and clients now expect to sign on a screen — though some matters, like real estate, still require wet signatures, which is one more thing to confirm with your lawyer. Whatever tool you use, keep three things: the executed copy stored with the project, a timestamp, and a copy in the client’s hands. What kills signature momentum isn’t the legal mechanics — it’s friction, like asking the client to print, sign, and scan, or making them create an account just to sign.

Getting paid: the contract’s real job

A contract is wired to cash flow through one rule: no signature, no work; no deposit, no work.The signed agreement and the paid deposit are the same gate, passed together. After that, the payment schedule does the collecting for you — each invoice arrives when the contract said it would, so it’s never a negotiation, just the document doing what it promised. The studios that struggle with collections are usually the ones whose invoices surprise people.

How StudioHaus handles it

StudioHaus^™ runs the whole loop in-platform, inside the project the agreement belongs to. Contracts — full design agreements, change orders, addenda — are drafted from your own saved templates (your language, not boilerplate handed to you) and sent with no third-party e-sign tool and no extra fee. The client receives a unique browser link that works on any device with no login or account: they read the agreement, type their full legal name as a signature, and confirm. The signature is recorded with a timestamp and the signing IP, the contract becomes read-only, and both sides can download the signed PDF. Agreements signed off-platform can be attached so the record still lives with the project, and a mis-sent contract can be voided, which kills its signing link immediately.

From there the contract’s payment schedule runs through the same surface: invoices sent and tracked in the branded client portal, paid by card through Stripe, and synced to QuickBooks Online — with reimbursables like IRS-rate site-visit mileage landing on the right invoice automatically. For how this compares to the all-in-one suites that also bundle contract signing, see our StudioHaus vs Houzz Pro comparison.