Contracts & signatures

What it is

Contracts & signatures lets you create legal agreements, send them to collaborators or clients, and collect their e-signatures — all without leaving Aden. You can sign documents drawn with a mouse/finger or typed as text; Aden assembles the completed PDF automatically.

Contracts come in several flavours, all flowing through the same signing engine — you send a link, the counterparty signs, and a PDF lands in the linked entity's document library:

• Team contracts — raised from the team's Contracts hub (/app/teams/[teamId]/contracts); agreements with your own team members or anyone by email (band agreements, internal splits, work-for-hire).
• Collaboration contracts — attached to a track; used for producer-for-hire arrangements (ghost production, co-production, mix/master service agreements).
• Album contracts — attached to an album via the Collaborators → Contracts tab (split sheets, feature agreements, label deals on a release). The signed PDF is filed under the album's documents.
• Event & booking contracts — raised from a team event's Contracts & signatures section: an event-level agreement (venue, promoter, crew) plus one contract per booked act. When a booking contract completes, the booking automatically flips to contract signed with the PDF attached.
• Tour contracts — raised from the tour page (riders, crew agreements, tour-wide booking terms).
• Organisation contracts — managed by org admins; cover booking deals, event agreements, tour riders, and similar. Teams see the contracts an org raised with them in their own Contracts hub.

The team contracts hub

Team → Contracts (sidebar, Team group) is the one place for everything signable:

• New contract — pick team members (searchable) and/or external emails, optionally write agreement terms shown on the signing page, optionally name an off-platform counterparty.
• Waiting for your signature — every pending signing link addressed to you, with a direct Review & sign button.
• Signing requests you've sent — all requests the team raised anywhere in the product, labelled with what they're attached to (Track · …, Event · …, Tour · …, Album · …) and with full manager controls.
• Contracts from organisations — the receiving side of the org → team flow: status, dates, version, and download links for the original and signed PDFs.

Using it

Setting up your contracting profile

Before sending contracts, go to Account → Contracting and fill in your legal name, business name, and any other details used to pre-fill merge fields.

Creating a contract from a template

1. Open a track, go to Collaborators → Contracts, and click New contract.
2. Choose a template (ghost production NDA, co-production agreement, mix/master service, or a custom template your team saved).
3. Fill in the merge fields (client name, fee, royalty split, etc.) — Aden pre-fills what it knows from your contracting profile and the selected contact.
4. Click Create — the contract is saved and attached to the track.

Sending for signature

After creating the contract, click Request signature. Add one or more signers by:

• Entering an email address (off-platform; they automatically receive an email with their private signing link).
• Selecting a platform user (they get a clickable in-app notification that opens their signing page, plus an email).

Each signer gets a unique link. Set an optional expiry date. The request starts in pending status, and the contract itself moves from draft to pending signature so its badge reflects that signatures are outstanding. When the last signer signs, the requester gets an "Everyone has signed" notification and email.

Signers vs. counterparty. Signers are the people who actually sign — each receives their own private signing link. The optional counterparty is just a reference label for the other party the agreement is with (e.g. a venue, promoter, or label that isn't on Aden). It's printed on the signed document but never receives a signing link — if that party needs to sign, add them as a signer (by email) instead.

After sending, the contract panel shows each signer by avatar, name and email along with their status, so you can see who has signed and who is still outstanding. Once someone signs, their captured signature (the drawn image or typed text) and the date are shown inline next to their name. While a request is still unsigned, managers can remove an individual pending signer or remove the whole request; once anything has been signed the request can only be cancelled, preserving the audit trail.

Signing a document (as a signer)

Open the link you received. The page greets you by your name and email (and avatar, if you're on Aden) and pre-fills the name field, so you can confirm the link is meant for you. If the request has an uploaded document (an org/collab contract file or an attached document), the page shows a "Read the document before signing" link so you can review exactly what you're agreeing to. You can:

• Draw your signature with mouse or touch. The draw pad is an animated flow (DrawSignature, apps/web/components/shared/draw-signature.tsx): a "Start signing" button expands into a paper-white pad with a pen cursor, then collapses into a "Signing done" confirmation you can re-open to edit. It wraps signature_pad under the hood, so the exported black-on-transparent SVG/PNG contract is unchanged. This same pad is used everywhere a signature is drawn — the public sign form, the in-app collaborators pad, and the beta letter-of-intent.
• Type your name in a signature font.

After signing, Aden marks your slot signed. Once all signers have signed, Aden assembles the completed PDF on the server — the original uploaded document followed by a signature certificate (each signer's signature image/typed text, timestamp and IP) — and attaches that combined file to the linked track, booking, or contract record.

Viewing signed documents

Go to Account → Signed documents to see everything you've personally signed. Org admins can see all contracts under Org → Team → Contracts.