Properties & Categories

Most teams track the same few facts about every contract: its type, what it’s worth, when it expires, who owns it, which department it belongs to. Usually that lives in a spreadsheet, a “contract register” with one row per agreement and a column for each fact.

Pactly keeps those facts on the contract itself. Contract properties are the columns of your register, the fields you track per contract. Categories are your contract types: NDA, MSA, MOU, and so on. Set them up once and they power forms, documents, approval routing, and reporting across your whole portfolio.

The two work together but answer different questions. A category is what kind of contract this is. A property is one fact about it.

You usually have a small set of categories and a larger set of properties. See Contract Types.

This is the one idea that makes everything else click.

A property is defined once in Settings under Manage Properties: a label, a type, and the contract types it applies to. That definition is the shared blueprint. The value is then set per contract: this NDA expires 2026-12-31, that MSA is worth $250,000.

So “Expiration Date” is defined once for your whole company, but every contract carries its own value. Editing the definition changes the blueprint for everyone. It does not fill in values on contracts that never had one.

Neither is “just a field” or “just a label.” Both get reused across the lifecycle, but they pull different levers. Properties carry the facts; categories set the frame those facts live in.

What properties power. Once a value lands on a contract, it travels:

• Forms: an intake form field writes its answer straight onto a property, so data captured at request time lands on the contract automatically. This is the most common way values get set.
• Templates: a property’s key drops into a template, so the generated document fills itself in.
• Filtering and reporting: properties become searchable, sortable columns on the contracts dashboard, so your register lives in Pactly, not a separate spreadsheet.
• Renewals: a date property like Expiration Date can drive reminders so nothing slips past its window.

What categories power. A category is the contract’s type, and that type decides how the contract is handled:

• Classification: the category records what kind of contract this is, which is what filtering, reporting, and the rest of the platform read off.
• Approval routing: workflows branch on category: route NDAs to one owner, send vendor agreements down a procurement chain, add an executive approver above a value threshold only for the types that need it.
• Templates and document generation: the category drives which template and paper a contract starts from, so each type generates from the right document.
• Reporting and filtering by type: category is a first-class filter on the dashboard, so “show me every MSA expiring next quarter” is one click, not a manual tag.
• Which properties surface in the compact sidebar: a per-type Show in miniview flag (Settings → Manage Properties → Settings tab) curates which properties appear in a contract’s compact sidebar for that type. This trims the at-a-glance view per contract type; it does not change which properties are attached.

Put together: the category classifies the contract and drives its routing, then the properties fill in the specifics. Which properties actually land on a contract is a separate question: a property marked globally default auto-attaches to every contract, while a Manual only property is added per contract. See Creating Contract Properties. Property values then get set three ways, covered in How Property Values Get Captured and Used: mapped intake form fields (the main path), AI extraction from uploaded documents, and workflow actions that stamp a value automatically.

Coming from a spreadsheet or another tool, here’s how the words map:

Once your fields are defined, the next step is deciding what happens for each kind of contract. See Workflows, where approval routing branches on the categories and properties you set up here.