Send the contracts you use every week in seconds.

Why do eSignature templates matter more than any other feature?

Most people who send documents for signature send the same few documents over and over: the same NDA, the same lease, the same freelance contract, the same offer letter with a different name and salary. If every send starts from a blank PDF, you spend your time dragging signature boxes around instead of closing the deal.

Our take: templates are the feature that turns e-signature from a nice convenience into a real time saver. Set up a document once, with signer roles and fields in the right places, and every future send becomes fill in the names, check the details, press send.

How do templates work in eSignSimple?

Upload a PDF or Word document, place signature, date, initials and text fields, and assign each field to a role such as Client, Tenant or Company. Save it as a template. Next time, pick the template, enter the real people for each role and send. Signing order, reminders, the audit trail and the certificate of completion all work exactly as they do for one-off documents.

Signers never need an account. They get a link, open it on a phone or laptop, and sign. When everyone has signed, each party gets the final PDF with a certificate listing timestamps, IP addresses, devices and the document's SHA-256 fingerprint, which anyone can check on our public verify page.

Where do templates save the most time?

Landlords reuse the same lease for every unit. HR teams reuse offer letters and policy acknowledgments. Freelancers reuse one contract with a different scope attached. Agencies reuse NDAs before every pitch. In each case the legal wording stays fixed and only the variables change, which is exactly what templates are built for.

Templates also reduce mistakes. When the signature field for the countersigning manager is already in place, nobody forgets to add it, and nobody accidentally sends an old version of the contract that a colleague edited last year.

How do other tools handle templates, and what do we think?

Every major e-signature product offers templates, and in larger platforms they come with conditional fields, approval workflows and shared template libraries across departments. Those are genuinely useful for big organizations. For most small teams they add setup time and push you towards higher-priced plans.

We keep templates simple on purpose, and we include them on every plan, including Free (see pricing). We think charging extra for the feature that makes the product usable is the wrong way round.

What should you check in the text of your templates?

A template makes it easy to send a document a hundred times, which also means a mistake in the wording gets repeated a hundred times. Before you save your core contracts as templates, have them reviewed by a lawyer who knows your jurisdiction, and review them again when laws or your business change.

Our free contract templates library, from the NDA to the freelance contract, is a good starting point for common documents, but it is general information, not legal advice. Adapt it, get it checked, and then let the template do the repetitive work.

How do you turn a contract you already use into a template?

Start from the final, approved version of the document, not a draft with tracked changes. If it lives in Word, upload the .docx directly; we convert it to PDF. Then think about roles before fields. A freelance contract usually has two roles, Client and Freelancer. A lease might have Tenant 1, Tenant 2 and Landlord. Name roles by what the person is, not by who they happen to be today, so "Client" rather than "Maria".

Next, place the fields. Every role that must agree needs at least a signature field; most contracts also want a date next to each signature and initials on pages with key terms such as fees or termination. Text fields work well for things the signer should fill in themselves, like a home address or a company registration number. Finally, decide whether signing order matters. If your side should countersign only after the other party has signed, put your role last.

A worked example: a design studio sends the same 6-page service agreement about 15 times a month. As a template it has two roles (Client first, Studio second), a signature and date for each role on page 6, client initials on page 3 where the payment terms are, and a text field for the client's billing address. Sending it now means picking the template, typing one name and one email, and pressing send. That is under a minute instead of five or six.

What should stay fixed and what should vary?

Templates work best when the legal wording is fixed and only a few details change. If you find yourself editing clauses before most sends, you do not have one template, you have several. Split them: an NDA for one-way disclosure and another for mutual disclosure, or a lease for furnished and one for unfurnished units. Two clean templates beat one template that you have to remember to change.

Details that change per deal, such as fees, dates or a scope of work, have two good homes. Either the signer fills them in through text fields, which suits things they know better than you (their address), or the details belong in a document you prepare for that one deal and upload on its own. A useful rule of thumb: if a detail changes on most sends and you are the one who knows it, it does not belong in a template.

Why do my fields land in the wrong place when the contract changes?

Field positions are stored relative to the page: a signature box sits a certain fraction of the way across and down page 4. If a new version of the contract has a longer clause that pushes the signature block from page 4 to page 5, a layout copied from the old version puts the box in the middle of a paragraph. That is not a bug, it is the cost of fixed positions, and every e-signature tool that places fields on a page works this way.

The fix is simple: whenever the wording changes, build the template from the new file, check every page and place the fields where the new layout needs them, then retire the old template so nobody sends it by mistake. We would also recommend keeping a version note in the template title, such as "Service agreement v3 (Oct 2026)", so everyone on your team knows which wording is live.

How do teams share templates?

On the Gold plan, up to 5 senders share one team, and templates can be shared with everyone in it. That is the main reason small agencies and offices move to Gold: one person maintains the approved NDA and service agreement, and everybody else sends from the same version instead of a copy saved on their own laptop. Documents themselves stay with the person who sent them.

On Free, Bronze and Silver, templates belong to a single sender. If you are a solo freelancer or a two-person business where one person handles contracts, that is all you need. Our guide on sending one document to multiple signers shows how roles and signing order fit together once you have more than one person signing.

Which documents make the best templates?