The Paper Trail
Nothing went wrong at signature; the deposit, the payment term, the revision cap, the kill fee and the IP clause went into a folder and stopped being live the moment they were agreed.
View on Etsy (opens in a new tab)The current price is on Etsy. We make and sell this ourselves — this is not an affiliate link.
What’s inside
- Seven databases: Agreements, Projects, Money Events, Approvals and Changes, Deliverables and IP, Clients, and The File, with six views across them.
- The five terms as live fields that watch the project: whether the deposit actually arrived before work started, how old each invoice is against the term you set rather than a generic default, revision rounds used against rounds sold and what the overage is worth at your rate, the kill fee you are owed if it stops and whether you ever invoiced it, and a count of the terms you never agreed at all.
- The exposure ladder: a single number per project, from six down to zero, reporting the worst thing currently true, sorted by how recoverable the problem is rather than how large, with one plain-English sentence on what to do about it.
- A separate alarm for IP that outranks every other warning: what has left your machine before you were paid, and whether it can come back.
- Five written guides (quick start, setting up your agreements, the weekly rhythm, reading the exposure ladder, and honest limits) plus a worked caseload already filled in: a freelance brand designer, five clients, seven projects, each built to trip a different rung.
Who this is for
Nothing goes wrong at signature. It goes wrong afterwards, because the terms stop being live the moment they are agreed, and six weeks later you are on round five, the deposit never fully landed, the client has your working files, and the invoice is nineteen days old. The Paper Trail is not a reminder. It is a comparison: what you agreed, against what has actually happened, at every moment, with the gap named in money.
The ladder sorts by how recoverable the problem is, not by how large the number is. A revision overage on a client who pays is annoying and fixable; money outstanding on a client who already has your source files may be unrecoverable at any price, because the files were the only leverage you had.