Help & Documentation

Each contract carries the legal text, the financial terms, and the signature state. Drafts are editable; once you send a contract for signature its content is locked.

• Create a new contract blank or pre-fill from an existing crew member (parties, subject, duration auto-populate).
• Compensation block — tariff selector and day-schedule editor for flexible rate structures (day rate, weekly rate, overtime, weekend rates).
• Clauses block — standard or custom clauses (cancellation policy, equipment responsibility, image rights, etc.).
• Status pipeline (dual-signature): Draft → Pending Signature → Producer Signed / Contractor Signed → Fully Signed. A contract can also be Rejected, Expired, or Analog Uploaded.
• A fully-signed contract produces a locked PDF version that can't be edited afterwards.
• A fully-signed contract also creates a timesheet for the crew member in Time Tracking, with the contract's rate, surcharges and cancellation terms. A TV FFS draft made before October 2026 had a flat +50 % for the 6th working day; it is set to 0 once when you open it, because the tariff pays the 6th and 7th day as weekly overtime. Contracts already sent or signed stay as they went out.
• After a rejection, the contract shows 'Changes since last version' — a list of what was changed before it went out again.

From the project's Contracts tab.

1. Open the project. New projects start without the Contracts tab — enable it via the project's '…' menu → 'Configure Tabs', or from the project card menu on the Dashboard.
2. Switch to the Contracts tab.
3. Click 'New Contract' for a blank contract, or 'From Crew' to auto-fill from an existing crew member.
4. In the Contract Editor, fill in Parties (you, the counterparty), Subject (what work is covered), and Duration (start and end dates).
5. Set Compensation — pick a tariff (or define a custom one), set the day schedule, add overtime / weekend / location bonus rules if relevant.
6. Review and adjust Clauses — cancellation policy, image rights, equipment responsibility, confidentiality. Add custom clauses for project-specific terms.
7. Save the draft. The status stays Draft until you click 'Send for Signature'.
8. The § Cancellation / kill-fee tiers you agree here are copied onto the timesheet when a fully-signed contract creates it — a canceled day then bills exactly the percentage the contract states, and equipment is included when the tightest tier reaches 100 %
9. Employment status (Subject section) decides what kind of contract this is. A German contract (German tariff, German law, or German language with no governing law) starts with nothing selected: choose 'Freelancer' or 'Employee' yourself — until you do, the title shows a placeholder and the contract cannot be sent for signature. Other contracts start as 'Freelancer'. 'Employee' switches the document to an employment contract — the title becomes EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT, every amount is stated GROSS, and § Billing settles through payroll instead of asking the contractor for an invoice. In an 'Employee' contract the parties are called Employer and Employee in every clause, and clauses that only fit a freelancer are replaced (no liability for replacement costs, limited employee liability, no own liability insurance, no indemnity for social-security claims, no invoice). This applies to new contracts, drafts and rejected contracts; a contract already sent or signed keeps the wording it went out with, and a clause you edited yourself is not changed. The form headings, the signature fields, the status chips and the hints under the form fields of such a contract say Employer and Employee too, and the template notice at the end of the document no longer speaks of a contractor who might be classified as an employee.
10. Switching the tariff rewrites everything the tariff owns: standard day, break, overtime tiers, the night / Saturday / Sunday / holiday / 6th-day percentages (TV FFS has no flat 6th-day surcharge — the 6th and 7th day are paid as weekly overtime), the night window, the cancellation ladder, and the venue and governing law. Anything you typed into the venue or governing-law fields yourself is kept.
11. Changing the contract language also re-derives the venue and governing law into that language, unless you typed your own wording. A custom (No Tariff) contract seeds neither — § Final Provisions shows a placeholder until you fill them in.

Four ways to be paid — including the two that pay nothing up front — plus the travel, expense, and showreel terms that decide the rest of the deal.

1. In the Contract Editor, open Compensation. The type selector offers four shapes: Day Rate, Lump Sum, Passion Project, and Deferred fee.
2. Day Rate is the default. Set the rate, the standard day, and the break handling; the calculated hourly rate appears underneath.
3. '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; set it to 11 to make surcharges begin in the 12th hour. The hour labels on the three surcharge fields follow it, and so do the tiers pushed onto the linked timesheet.
4. Night, Weekend & Holiday Surcharges cover night work (with its own time window), Saturday, Sunday, public holidays, and the 6th working day in a calendar week. Set a rate to 0 to leave that surcharge out of the contract entirely — the linked timesheet stops billing it too.
5. Passion Project states that no fee is owed. Two sub-options decide what the contractor does get: whether costs are still covered, and whether a credit plus footage for the showreel is agreed. The cancellation section drops its kill-fee ladder, because a percentage of no fee is meaningless.
6. Deferred fee (Rückstellung) states a fee that becomes payable only on a success trigger — revenue reaching the fee, financing secured, first release, or a condition you word yourself. Set the payment window, an optional revenue share, and whether the claim lapses after a number of months.
7. A deferred fee is deliberately kept OUT of the contract total: it is not an immediately due receivable, and the billing section says so explicitly.
8. Open Travel & Expenses. 'Reimburse travel costs' settles at actual cost against receipts, as a mileage allowance per km, or as one flat allowance for the whole production.
9. 'Per-diem allowance (Spesen)' uses either the statutory tax-free allowance or a negotiated daily amount. A third switch states who books and pays accommodation.
10. Switching either term off does not remove it from the contract — it changes the wording to an explicit 'not reimbursed'. Silence in a contract is what these switches exist to prevent.
11. Open Optional Clauses & Final for the showreel term: not regulated (the default, which adds no clause at all), allowed, allowed after first release, or not allowed.
12. The § Duration and § Billing day counts exclude days marked 'Day Off' — they state working days, not schedule rows.
13. A daily lump sum pays travel days at half the daily flat, exactly as the linked timesheet bills them; a project lump sum covers travel within the total.

Every paragraph in the contract preview is editable in place. Click into it and type — the edit is kept per paragraph, survives later changes to the form, and travels into the PDF and the signing link.

• Open the contract with 'Edit'. The 'Preview' pane is the document itself, not a picture of it: click into any paragraph and change the wording.
• Edits are stored per paragraph, not as one block. Changing a form field afterwards regenerates every other paragraph and leaves the one you edited alone.
• To go back to the generated wording, delete everything inside that paragraph. An empty paragraph falls back to the text the template produces.
• Editable paragraphs run through the whole document: subject, duration, every compensation clause, equipment rental, travel, the Grant of Usage Rights (Buyout) paragraphs, the showreel clause, liability, and the contractor side of Cancellation / Kill Fee.
• Once the contract is locked or fully signed, editing stops and the preview becomes read-only.

Both sides sign: you as the producer, and the crew member. The crew member can sign inside the app if they are on the project, or through a signing link without an account.

• In the Contract Editor, click 'Send for Signature' and confirm the reminder to have the contract reviewed. The contract is now locked and reads Pending Signature.
• Sign your side with 'Sign Contract': draw your signature or upload an image, then confirm. A crew member who is on the project signs their side the same way.
• For a crew member outside the app, click 'Create Signing Link': enter the 'Recipient Email', optionally switch on 'Password Protection', choose 'Link Expires In', then click 'Create Link' and copy it or use 'Send via Email'.
• They open the link in a browser (desktop or mobile), confirm the email address it was sent to, review the contract, and sign — by drawing the signature or uploading a signature image — with 'Sign Digitally'. They can also download the PDF to sign on paper, or click 'Decline contract' and say why: the contract then reads Rejected with their reason, you get an email, and the link stops working.
• Signing is dual: the status moves to Producer Signed or Contractor Signed as each side signs, and only flips to Fully Signed once both have signed. A locked PDF version becomes available then.
• A contract signed on paper is added with 'Upload Signed Contract'; its status becomes Analog Uploaded.
• If your saved signature is already on the contract when you press Send for Signature, that counts as the producer signature: the contract goes out as Producer Signed and only the counterparty is still outstanding. Signing links work from that status too.
• Send for Signature checks the contract is finished first. If the employment status, the position, the end date, the day schedule or the fee is still blank, the send is blocked and the missing fields are listed — those blanks would otherwise print as [Position], [End Date] or [EUR ___ net] inside the signed document.
• The fully-signed PDF carries both signatures, the contract text frozen at sign time, and timestamps.
• Employee contracts under German law are fixed-term and need written form (§ 14 (4) TzBfG): paper signatures from both parties, or a qualified electronic signature. A signature made in the app is a simple electronic signature — binding for contracts that need no particular form, but not a substitute for statutory written form — so the app shows a warning on the form, in the sign dialog, in the Create Signing Link dialog and on the signing page. Signing in the app stays possible; download the PDF and sign it by hand.

All contracts for a project appear in the Contracts list with their current status.

• Status badges: Draft, Pending Signature, Producer Signed, Contractor Signed, Fully Signed (plus Rejected, Expired, Analog Uploaded).
• 'Changes since last version' lists what changed in a contract since it was rejected — added, changed and removed terms — so both sides see what the revision is about.
• Each contract appears as a card showing the counterparty's name, their role, a language badge, the tariff, and the day rate (or lump sum) — with a status badge in the corner and edit, duplicate, export-PDF, and delete actions along the bottom.
• Deleting a project for good also deletes its contracts on the server that nobody has signed (drafts, sent, declined and expired ones) together with their signing links. Contracts that carry a signature are kept until you delete your account, and a signing link that is still open on one of them is closed. Moving a project to the trash deletes nothing, and switching collaboration off for a project keeps its contracts and signing links.

Unlike most surfaces in a shared project, Contracts is intentionally private. The project owner sees every contract; everyone else sees only the contracts they are the contractor on.

• If you create a contract on a shared project, other regular collaborators do NOT see it in their Contracts list.
• The project owner sees every contract in the project — that's how production-level oversight works without exposing every crew member's personal terms to everyone.
• The owner can give a collaborator the same overview: in the project's collaborator list, switch on 'See all crew contracts' for that person. Being an editor alone does not show other people's contracts.
• Because of this scope, the per-field collaboration locks that apply elsewhere in the project workspace do NOT apply on the Contracts tab.
• Sub-renting your gear to the production? That goes via the Sub-Rentals page (separate financial flow). Contracts is for crew agreements specifically.