Adding Properties to a Single Contract

Most properties attach themselves to every new contract, so the field is waiting for you before anyone types anything. Some are deliberately not. A property set to Manual only stays off contracts until somebody asks for it, which is how you keep a rarely used field out of the way of the people who never need it.

When a contract turns out to need one of those fields, you add it yourself. It takes a few seconds and it changes nothing outside that one contract.

1. Open the contract and go to the Properties tab.
2. Pick the group you want the field to live in, from the list down the left.
3. Select Add Property.
4. Search for the property you want.
5. Tick it.
6. Select Add.

The field appears on the contract straight away, sitting in its proper place inside the group rather than at the bottom of the page.

You do not have to repeat the whole thing for each field. While the Add Property window is open, search again and carry on ticking. Everything you have already selected stays selected, and the counter at the top keeps a running total. Select Add once at the end and they are all created together.

That turns a dozen trips into one on a contract that needs a whole set of related fields.

A group of related properties is not a checklist. Where a group offers several variations of the same idea, take the ones that describe this contract and leave the rest alone. An empty field is ignored everywhere it would otherwise appear, so adding fields you will never fill in only makes the contract longer to read and your exports wider.

Added fields are not appended to the end. Each one takes its position from how the property is configured, so it appears inside its group, in the same order it would have had if it had been there from the start.

If a field you add appears somewhere unexpected, outside the group you chose or out of sequence, that points at how the property itself is set up rather than anything you did when adding it. An administrator can correct it once in Settings and every contract picks up the correction.

Adding a property to one contract affects that contract only.

Nor does it fill anything in. The field arrives empty and waits for a value, whether that value is typed in, mapped from a form, extracted from the document, or stamped by a workflow.

• Creating Contract Properties
• Capturing and Using Values
• Managing Properties: Best Practices and Pitfalls