Why the Plugin Shows the Wrong Contract

You open a document in Word, the Pactly Word Plugin loads, and it takes you straight into a contract record. The trouble is, it’s the wrong one. The positions, rounds, and history belong to a different agreement, and nothing you do in the document seems to land where you expect.

This almost always comes down to one thing: the file you opened carries hidden metadata pointing at a contract you’ve seen before.

When the plugin first works with a document, it writes a hidden contract reference into the file’s Word document properties (pactlyContractId and pactlyContractType). The next time the file is opened, the plugin reads that reference and jumps straight to the matching contract record, no manual linking needed. That auto-detection is the feature working as intended. Because the reference lives in the document’s custom properties rather than the visible text, it survives Save As, copy-paste into a new file, and renaming, with no on-page sign that it’s there.

The reference travels with the file. So when a document is copied, duplicated, renamed, or reused as the starting point for a new agreement, the new file inherits the original’s hidden reference. The plugin reads it and confidently opens the original contract, not the new one you meant to work on.

Common ways this shows up:

• You saved an existing Pactly contract as a new file to start a fresh agreement from the same shell.
• You forwarded or re-downloaded a document, and the plugin opens the contract it remembers rather than the one in front of you.
• A colleague’s generated document was reused for a different counterparty.

The fix is to re-associate the open document with the contract record it actually belongs to. This overwrites the stale hidden reference with the correct one. Manual relink is available on Enterprise plans. If you don’t see the entry point described below, contact your Pactly account manager about your plan.

1. With the document open in Word, open the Pactly Word Plugin panel.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the panel and select Not seeing the results you expected?
3. On the Associate to existing contract screen, set Contract type to match the document: On-Template contract (built from your organization’s template) or Playbook contract (a counterparty document reviewed against a playbook).
4. Use the Filter by name or reference… field to narrow the list, select the correct contract from the Name / Reference table, and click Link document.

From then on, the plugin opens this document against the right contract, and edits, rounds, and reviews track where they should.

For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see Link a Document to an Existing Contract.

The hidden reference is what makes auto-detection convenient, so the goal isn’t to remove it, it’s to stop one contract’s reference from ending up on another contract’s file.

• Don’t reuse a generated file to start a new agreement. Create the new contract in Pactly and work from its own document, rather than saving an old one under a new name.
• When you do reuse a file, relink it straightaway using the steps above, before you start reviewing or redlining.
• If a document opens to a contract you don’t recognize, stop and check the reference against the contract you intended to work on before making edits.

• Link a Document to an Existing Contract
• Running a Playbook Review
• The Pactly Word Plugin
• Signing in to Pactly