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Understanding why clients may not be able to sign your contract
Understanding why clients may not be able to sign your contract

Discover the common reasons why a client is unable to sign a contract.

Updated over 3 months ago

Occasionally, your client might face difficulties signing your contract. This article covers some common reasons for these occurrences and provides solutions to help resolve them.

To learn more about Bonsai's Contracts feature, take a look at our article on creating completely custom contracts.

Common barriers to signing contracts

These are the most common reasons why a client is unable to sign a contract they've received.

  • The contract has not been sent to the client

  • The client was given the wrong URL

  • The contract was already accessed via URL

  • The client's browser is blocking cookies

The contract has not been sent to the client

Your contract might not have been properly sent from Bonsai to your client.

To check the status of your contact, head over to Client Management > Contracts within the navigation bar. Select your contract, and review if it has been sent under the 'Status' section.

If the contract has been sent, it will be in a 'Sent' status.

If the contract has not yet been signed and sent, it will be in a 'Drafted' state. To move forward, click on 'Sign Contract', confirm your signature, and send the contract to the client.

If the contract has been signed but not yet sent to the client, it will be in a 'Finalized' state. From here, you can simply click on 'Send Contract' and share it with your client via email or URL.

The client was given the wrong URL

For security reasons, Bonsai uses different tokenized URLs for each person receiving a contract. For a step-by-step guide on how to share contracts via URL, review our article on how to generate a contract URL.

It's possible that an incorrect link was shared with the user. To remedy this, locate your contract and select the 'Send Reminder' button.

From here, copy the link provided and send it to your client.

The contract was already accessed via URL

Another possibility is the user attempting to share their own URL with others, which will cause the recipient to be redirected to a "Contract Not Found" page.

If this happens, follow the same steps above under 'The client was given the wrong URL' to share a new link with your client.

The client's browser is blocking cookies

It's uncommon, but some people disable cookies in their browsers due to privacy concerns. Unfortunately, this can cause many issues when using web applications.

If your client is able to view the contract but unable to submit the signature form, they may have cookies disabled in their browser. In this case, you can either ask them to enable cookies in their browser or you can manually mark the contract as accepted.

Common Solutions

To troubleshoot:

  • Make sure your contract is sent properly - confirm that the contract has been sent correctly and check its status.

  • Mark as Accepted - as the author of the contract, you can mark a contract as accepted if it has been sent. Follow the process in the article marking a proposal as accepted for a client to complete this action.

  • Ask your client to make sure that cookies are enabled on their browser - cookies are necessary when using web applications like Bonsai. As such, cookies will need to be enabled or the contract can be manually marked as accepted instead.

For additional assistance with clients signing contracts, get in touch with our Support team at support@hellobonsai.com.

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