Approval or signature

Send to client, on the quote itself, asks what you want back before it sends anything:

• Ask them to sign — a signed agreement, with an e-signature and a full audit trail.
• Ask them to approve — a recorded yes. Their name, the time, no signature.

Ask for a signature when the document is the agreement: a new managed services contract, a project SOW, anything with a term and a commitment on both sides.

Ask for approval when the terms are already agreed and you need a yes on the numbers — adding ten seats to an existing agreement, approving an hourly estimate, confirming a change order under an MSA that is already signed. An approval on an addition is governed by the agreement it belongs to, which is why it does not need its own signature block.

They get an email with a link. They do not need an account and never will — the link is the credential, and it is checked against a stored hash rather than kept anywhere readable.

On the page they read the agreement in full, then sign. Two separate things are required before the button will do anything: their signature, and an affirmative tick consenting to sign electronically. That separation is what the ESIGN Act asks for — intent to sign, and consent to do it electronically — and bundling them into one action is exactly what makes a signature arguable later.

Once signed they are offered an account, so the agreement and everything else you send them lives somewhere they can find it. It is genuinely optional; their emailed link keeps working either way.

Every document carries a trail, and it is recorded as things happen rather than reconstructed afterwards:

• Sent for signature
• Opened by the recipient
• Approved, or signed, by the client
• Declined by the recipient, or withdrawn by you
• Agreement ended early, if it ever is

Each entry has a timestamp and an IP address, and the document itself is recorded as a hash — so you can show not just that somebody signed, but that they signed this exact document and not a later revision of it. That is what the certificate of completion renders.

The trail includes the unflattering entries on purpose. An evidence record that shows a contract being signed and stays silent about it being cancelled is worse than no record at all.

Agreements is the list of everything you have sent, with signer status on every line. Re-sending the same document — because the email was lost, or the link expired — does not count against your plan again.