Managing Contracts

Track contributor agreements from draft through signature — for publication contracts with authors and service contracts with editors, designers, and other collaborators.

What Contracts Are

A contract is an agreement between your workspace and a contributor. Inkwren supports two types:

• Publication contracts: Tied to a specific story appearance in a publication. These track the agreement between a publisher and an author (or other contributor) for a particular piece of content.
• Service contracts: General agreements for services like editing, cover design, proofreading, formatting, or marketing. These are tied to a contributor but not to a specific story.

Feature Availability

Contracts are part of the Contract Management feature. If you don't see Contracts in your sidebar, your workspace administrator may need to enable it. Contracts are enabled by default for publisher workspaces.

Viewing Your Contracts

Click Contracts in the sidebar under the Business section. You'll see a table showing:

• Type (Publication or Service)
• Publication or service type
• Story (for publication contracts)
• Contributor name
• Series (for publication contracts)
• Status (based on your workflow)
• Last updated date

Filtering Contracts

Use the filters above the table:

• Search: Search by notes content
• Type: Show only Publication or Service contracts
• Status: Filter by workflow status (Draft, Sent, Signed, etc.)
• Publication: Show contracts for a specific publication
• Story: Show contracts for a specific story
• Series: Show contracts across a series
• Author: Show all contracts for one author

Creating a Contract

Publication Contract

1. Click Create Contract at the top of the page
2. Select Publication Contract
3. Choose the publication, then the story, then the author
4. Set the initial status and optionally fill in dates
5. Add any notes
6. Click Create Contract

You can also create publication contracts from the Contracts tab on a publication's detail page, which pre-fills the publication context.

Service Contract

1. Click Create Contract at the top of the page
2. Select Service Contract
3. Choose the contributor
4. Enter the service type (e.g., "Cover Design", "Editing", "Proofreading") — Inkwren suggests types you've used before
5. Optionally add a service description
6. Add any notes
7. Click Create Contract

Contract Lifecycle

Each contract follows a workflow template that defines the statuses it can move through. Your workspace's default workflow template is applied automatically when creating new contracts. The default "Standard Contract Workflow" has these stages:

Status	Meaning
Draft	Contract created but not yet sent
Sent	Contract sent to the contributor
Author Signed	Contributor has signed
Publisher Signed	Publisher/workspace owner has counter-signed
Author Copy Sent	Signed copy sent back to the contributor
Filed	Contract complete and filed

Your workspace can customize these stages — see Contract Workflow Settings below. The status labels and colors you see on your contracts come from whichever workflow template is assigned.

Updating Contract Status

The contract edit modal has two save buttons:

• Save Changes: Saves all field edits without affecting date fields
• Update Status: Changes the status and automatically records the date for that step (e.g., moving to "Sent" records the sent date)

Use Update Status when progressing through the workflow so dates are tracked automatically. Use Save Changes when editing other fields like notes without changing the status.

Contract Detail Page

Click any contract to open its detail page, which shows:

• Status and workflow progress: Current status with color-coded badge
• Contributor: Who the contract is with
• Story and publication: For publication contracts, the linked story appearance
• Service type and description: For service contracts
• Key dates: Sent, author signed, publisher signed, author copy sent, filed
• Template: Which template was used to generate this contract (if any)
• Notes: Free-form notes about the contract
• Modification tracking: Whether the contract has been modified from its template, with notes about what changed (only shown for contracts generated from a template)

Editing a Contract

1. Open the contract detail page
2. Update status, dates, notes, or modification details
3. Click Save Changes or Update Status (see Updating Contract Status above)

The contract type, contributor, and story appearance cannot be changed after creation. If these are wrong, delete the contract and create a new one.

Deleting Contracts

1. Click the delete action on the contract row, or open the detail page and click Delete
2. Confirm the deletion

For bulk operations, select multiple contracts in the list and use Delete Selected (up to 100 at a time).

Contract Templates

Templates are ODT or DOCX files with placeholders that Inkwren fills in when generating contracts.

Uploading Templates

1. Go to workspace settings and find Contract Templates
2. Click Upload Template
3. Select an ODT or DOCX file (up to 10 MB)
4. Give the template a name

Generating Contracts from Templates

From a publication's Contracts tab:

1. Assign a template to one or more story/contributor pairs
2. Click Create N Contracts to create contract records and generate PDFs from templates
3. Download the generated contracts as a ZIP file

Contract Workflow Settings

Customize how contract statuses work for your workspace:

1. Go to workspace settings and find Contract Workflows
2. The default "Standard Contract Workflow" has six stages (Draft through Filed)
3. To create a custom workflow:
   • Click Add Template
   • Name your workflow template
   • Add stages with labels, colors, and types (Todo, In Progress, Complete)
   • Set one workflow template as the default for new contracts

Contracts on Publication Pages

The Contracts tab on a publication detail page shows progress cards (Not Started, In Progress, Complete) at the top and lists all story/contributor pairs with their contract status. From here you can:

• See which contributors have contracts and which don't
• Assign templates to multiple appearances at once
• Generate contracts in batch
• Download generated contracts

This is often the most efficient way to manage publication contracts rather than working with them one at a time.

Tips

• Use the publication Contracts tab for batch work: When publishing an anthology, assign a template and generate contracts for all contributors at once
• Track service contracts for non-publication work: Keep editing, design, and formatting agreements alongside your publication contracts
• Set up a custom workflow if your process differs: Not every publisher follows the same signing sequence — customize the workflow to match yours
• Record modification notes: If a contributor negotiates changes to the standard contract, mark it as modified and note what changed
• Use service type suggestions: Inkwren remembers service types you've used before, so your naming stays consistent across contracts