What has to carry
- The scope, in the same wording the customer agreed to.
- The exclusions, visible to whoever is on site.
- Materials and quantities as priced.
- The payment schedule and its trigger events.
- Access notes, gate codes, pets, parking, working-hours constraints.
- The customer record and its full history — not a fresh contact.
Why re-entry is the failure point
When someone retypes the scope into a job record, small differences appear immediately: a line item summarized, an exclusion dropped, a quantity rounded. The crew builds from the retyped version and the customer holds you to the signed one.
The fix is structural rather than behavioural. The job should reference the executed contract, and where information is copied it should be copied by the system rather than by a person under time pressure.
Scheduling comes after execution, not after the first signature
Dispatching against a partially signed agreement is a recurring source of loss: material ordered, a day booked, and the countersignature never happens or the customer changes their mind before it does. Execution — every required signer complete, one final document produced — is the gate.
Billing inherits the schedule
The payment terms agreed in the contract should be what the invoicing runs on. Re-deciding the deposit or the milestone amounts at invoice time is how businesses end up billing something the customer never agreed to, then explaining it.
The boundary being preserved
The appointment created the customer. The sold estimate creates the job. The contract records what was agreed between those two events. An unsold estimate never reaches this page — it enters estimate follow-up against the existing customer and never returns to the lead pipeline.