Contracts Management

The Contracts tab lets you draft, review, and collect signatures on project contracts directly inside Cine Power Planner. Contracts sit alongside the rest of a project but follow a deliberately different sharing model than gear lists or call sheets.

Per-User Storage (Not Shared With Collaborators)

A contract is visible to the person it names as the contractor — not to whoever typed it, and not to the project at large. Everyone else on the project sees nothing of it.

This is intentional:

Producers, directors, and crew often negotiate personal contracts whose terms should not be visible to the rest of the team.
Clients or legal reviewers invited to a project should never gain read access to another user's agreements.
The Contracts tab is exempt from the collaboration lock/presence/merge systems described in Collaboration.

Two exceptions, and one of them will surprise you

The project owner sees every contract. Always, with no toggle.
Any collaborator can be granted "See all crew contracts." The owner turns it on per person in the workspace Collaborators panel, beside the budget-visibility toggle. It is off by default.

⚠️ Drafting a contract for someone else does not keep it on your own list. Visibility follows the contractor, so a producer who is not the project owner — and does not hold the grant above — writes a contract for a crew member and then cannot see it, while that crew member can. Contracts you write for yourself behave the way you would expect. If you draft for others regularly, ask the owner for the grant.

A contract whose contractor has no account on the project (an external hire, say) names no one, so only the owner and grant-holders ever see it in the tab. Sending it out is unaffected — see External Signing Links.

Editing is a separate question from seeing: the project owner and editors can edit any contract still in draft or rejected, and the person who created it can edit their own. Once it is out for signature nobody edits it.

Key Features

Split-pane editor — review contract content and edit clauses side-by-side.
Clause library — insert standard clauses (deliverables, payment terms, IP, confidentiality) from a reusable library.
In-app signature pad — sign contracts yourself with a touch or mouse signature without leaving the app.
PDF generation — assemble a finished PDF with signatures, timestamps, and clause metadata. No third-party document service is required.
Offline access — your own contract drafts and signed PDFs remain available offline via local storage.

Compensation Shapes

A contract can be written in one of four shapes, picked at the top of the Compensation section:

Shape	What the contract says
Day Rate	A rate per shooting day, plus overtime, break and rest-time terms. The default.
Lump Sum	A project total, or a daily flat amount.
Passion Project	No fee is owed, stated plainly — with sub-options for whether costs are still covered and whether a credit plus showreel footage is the agreed consideration. The cancellation § drops its kill-fee ladder.
Deferred fee (Rückstellung)	A stated fee payable only once a success trigger is met: revenue reaching the fee, financing secured, first release, or a condition you word yourself. Carries a payment window, an optional revenue share and an optional sunset.

A deferred fee is kept out of the contract total. It is not an immediately due receivable, the billing § says so, and it is reported separately rather than folded in.

Overtime and day-type surcharges

Overtime starts after hour decouples the surcharge threshold from the standard day — leave it blank to start overtime at the end of the standard day, or set it to 11 so surcharges begin in the 12th hour. Below it, Night, Weekend & Holiday Surcharges cover night work (with its own time window), Saturday, Sunday, public holidays and the 6th working day of a calendar week.

Setting a rate to 0 removes that surcharge from the contract and stops the linked timesheet billing it — the § and the invoice are driven by the same numbers.

Employment Status: Freelancer or Employee

The Subject section carries a top-level switch that decides what kind of document this is.

Freelancer (default) — a services agreement. Amounts are stated net of VAT, the contractor invoices, and § 1 carries the self-employment covenant for the tariff's country.
Employee — an employment contract. The title changes (ARBEITSVERTRAG / EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT / CONTRAT DE TRAVAIL / CONTRATTO DI LAVORO SUBORDINATO), every amount is stated gross, and § Billing settles through payroll: the employer withholds the statutory deductions, the employee raises no invoice, and no VAT arises on the pay. An equipment rental agreed alongside it stays a separate VAT invoice, because it is one. A deferred fee inside an employment relationship carries a caution — deferring wages is only permissible to a limited extent.

When a tariff is selected, a second switch decides whether the contract cites the tariff by name or only mirrors its rules. All four supported tariffs are employment-relationship tariffs in their original scope, so a freelance contract that cites one invites a reclassification argument; the rules-only binding gives the same working-time and surcharge structure without naming it.

Both are destructive on purpose, and both stop at anything you typed yourself.

Switching the tariff rewrites the standard day, the break, the overtime tiers, all five day-type percentages, the night window, the two penalty percentages, the cancellation ladder, and the venue plus governing law. Those working-time fields are read-only for a tariff-bound contract — the tariff owns them — so leaving stale values behind would leave the contract contradicting the tariff § it prints two paragraphs later.
Switching the contract language re-derives the venue and the governing law into that language. They are stored strings, not generated text: without this a contract drafted in German and switched to Italian kept printing "Es gilt deutsches Recht".
A custom (No Tariff) contract seeds neither. § Final Provisions shows a visible placeholder for both until you fill them in, rather than quietly applying a national law nobody chose.

Travel & Expenses

A dedicated section makes reimbursement an explicit term rather than an assumption:

Travel costs — actual cost against receipts, a mileage allowance per km, or one flat allowance for the whole production.
Per-diem (Spesen) — the statutory tax-free allowance, or a negotiated daily amount.
Accommodation — whether the production books and pays for hotels.

Switching a term off does not delete it from the contract; the wording changes to an explicit "not reimbursed". Every switch defaults to the old unconditional promise, so contracts written before this section existed read exactly as they did.

Showreel Clause

Under Optional Clauses & Final, choose whether the contractor may cut the material into their own showreel, portfolio and website: not regulated (the default — adds no § at all), allowed, allowed after first release, or not allowed. Each explicit choice adds its own numbered § with the customary limits on excerpt length, credit, re-cutting and sublicensing.

External Signing Links

When a client or crew member needs to sign — but should not get editing access to your project — use the external signing flow via Create Signing Link:

Open the contract in the Contracts tab.
Click Create Signing Link (opens the CreateSigningLinkModal).
Enter the recipient's email and any optional instructions.
Send the generated link by email or messenger.

The recipient opens the link in a mobile-friendly standalone signing workspace:

They see only the finalized PDF of the contract — not the surrounding project.
They apply their signature via touch or trackpad.
The signed PDF returns to the contract record and is archived under the Contracts tab.

External signers never become project collaborators and gain no access to gear lists, budgets, call sheets, or other contract drafts.

What must be filled before a contract can be sent

Send for Signature and Revise & Resend both check that the contract is a finished document first. If anything below is still blank the send is blocked and the missing fields are listed under the button:

both parties — each identified by a person's name or a company, whichever you use
the project name and the position being contracted
the start and end date, and at least one day in the day schedule
the fee for the shape of the deal you picked — day rate, lump sum, or the deferred amount (a passion project has no amount, so none is required)

A rental agreement created from a quote is scored on its own fields instead: both parties, both dates, and the rent. It has no position, project or day schedule, and is not asked for them.

These are exactly the fields that would otherwise print as [Position], [End Date], [EUR ___ net] or [No days configured] inside the document the counterparty signs.

One person cannot sign both sides

The app refuses to let a single account apply the producer signature and the contractor signature. Anyone on the producer side — the project owner, an editor, whoever created the contract, or whoever sent it — is barred from the contractor branch even when the contract names them as the contractor. Without that rule an owner who had written themselves a contract could countersign their own signature and mark it fully signed single-handedly.

The practical consequence: if you are contracting yourself, someone else has to sign the other side, or the counterparty signs through a signing link.

Contract status while a link is outstanding

Create Signing Link is available from any status where the contract is out for signature — Pending Signature, Producer Signed, and Contractor Signed.

If your saved signature is already attached when you press Send for Signature, the contract goes out as Producer Signed rather than Pending Signature: it already carries the producer signature, and only the counterparty is outstanding. That is also the status the "awaiting contractor" reminder is keyed on, so those contracts now get the nudge.

Rejecting a contract revokes every active signing link for it, so a link already sitting in someone's inbox cannot be opened against the superseded text.

What Is Not Supported

Real-time sync of contracts to collaborators — contracts are per-user; no broadcast.
Project-wide lock/merge UI for contracts — see Collaboration; the Contracts tab is explicitly exempt.
Bulk signing workflows — each contract uses its own signing link.

Projects & Workspace
Collaboration — note the Contracts tab exemption
PDF Tools

Last Updated: 2026-09-10 Version: 0.790.2