Contract Form Helper

Read this part first

What this produces is a draft. It assembles plain-language clauses you picked from a list and fills your names, dates and figures into them. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, it is not legal advice, and nothing in it is offered as standard, sufficient or enforceable. Contract law is state law in the United States and differs again outside it. Some clauses cannot be used in some places. Whole categories of agreement — anything involving employment, consumers, residential tenancies, or regulated professions — carry requirements that a generic form has no way to know about.

So the honest description of the output is: a starting point to take to a lawyer, or to adapt yourself with your eyes open. The value of it is that a blank page is the reason most small arrangements never get written down at all. Having a draft on the table means the conversation about terms actually happens, and it happens before the work starts rather than after something goes wrong. Treat every clause as a first sentence someone else should improve, not as a finished one.

The four shapes

A services agreement covers one side doing work and the other paying for it, where the finish line is a job done rather than a thing delivered. A purchase agreement covers goods changing hands, where delivery and condition on arrival are the questions that come up. An independent contractor agreement is shaped like a services agreement but adds the two subjects that generate most freelance disputes: who owns the finished work, and whether the relationship is a contract or an employment. A loan agreement is a different animal from the other three — it is about money moving one way and coming back later, and the record that the money actually moved matters as much as the document.

Picking a type changes how the parties are named, which clauses are offered, and how the payment section is written. Some clauses are dropped where they make no sense — a loan has no work product to own, so that clause is left out even if the box is ticked, and the draft tells you it was.

Payment schedules and whole cents

Percentage splits do not divide evenly. Take $4,800.00 across 30/40/30: the exact instalments are $1,440.00, $1,920.00 and $1,440.00, which happens to work. Take $4,801.00 instead and the exact figures are $1,440.30, $1,920.40 and $1,440.30, which do not exist as separate roundings that still sum to the total. So every instalment except the last is rounded to the nearest cent and the final one is set to the remainder — total minus everything already scheduled. The consequence is that the last payment sometimes is not the round number the percentage implies, and the reason is that it is carrying the leftover cents so the schedule adds back exactly to the contract amount.

Equal monthly payments work the same way: the first months are all the same rounded figure and the final month absorbs whatever is left. This is the same convention a lender uses on a final payment, and it is worth knowing about because someone will eventually notice that month twelve is three cents different from month eleven and ask.

The clauses, briefly

The late payment clause sets a charge on overdue amounts, expressed as a percentage per month because that is how invoice terms are usually written. What a late charge may be set at is regulated in a lot of places, so the figure is worth checking rather than picking. Confidentiality keeps each side from passing the other side's private business information around, and carves out the obvious exceptions — already public, already known, or required by a court.

The termination clause gives a way out that is not simply walking off: put the problem in writing, allow a fixed window to fix it, and only then end the arrangement. Work already done gets paid for and money paid for work not done comes back. The work-product clause says the client owns the finished thing once it is paid for, while tools and templates the contractor already had stay theirs — the point of contention on nearly every freelance job that goes sour.

Independent contractor status is worth writing down and worth understanding the limits of. Whether a relationship is a contract or an employment is decided by what actually happens day to day — who controls the work, whose equipment, whose hours — not solely by what a document declares. The clause records the parties' intention, which is a useful thing to have recorded, and it does not decide the question.

Governing law names a state whose law the parties intend to apply, and the courts they intend to use. This is not a formality: without it, a dispute can end up somewhere neither side wanted to travel to. It is also not always the last word, since where a claim can be brought is not entirely up to the parties. That is precisely the kind of thing worth asking about rather than assuming.

Signing, and what happens to what you typed

The printed version has a signature block for both sides with room for a printed name and a date. Print two copies and keep one each. Fill in addresses, not just names — two people share a name, and if something goes wrong the other side needs an address to write to. If the draft runs to several pages, initialling each page is a common habit and costs nothing.

All of it runs in your browser. Names, addresses and amounts are not uploaded and are not saved between visits, so a reload clears everything. Copy the draft text out or print it before you leave the page. And before anyone signs, take the draft to someone qualified to read it in your state.

Questions people ask