Best way to handle contracts with templates and uploads in Bubble?

[olgahvesko]

Hi Bubble community

I’m building a Contracts module in Bubble and would love advice from anyone who has done something similar.

Key requirements:

• Convert an accepted offer → contract with pre-filled data (contractor, role, rate, dates)

• Create a contract from scratch

• Allow employers to upload their own contracts (PDF/DOCX), including multiple documents (e.g. MSA, SOW, NDA)

• Provide standard contract templates (US and Canada)

• Store contract terms as structured metadata linked to a Job or Offer

• Support contract versions (e.g. SOW v2 for renewals while keeping the same contract)

• Contract storage and retrieval

Main question:
From a Bubble architecture point of view, is the most realistic approach to treat a contract as:

• a database record (status, parties, dates, terms), and

• attached document files (generated from templates or uploaded as-is)?

Have you used any document generation tools (PDFMonkey, Documint, DocxBuilder, etc.) for this?
Any lessons learned or things to avoid?

Thanks in advance

[ihsanzainal84]

Just sharing my experience designing a similar process. For digital contracts:

• it’s important to hash final versions. Match this hash clientside at important points such as during signing and export.
• you can go the extra mile and keep draft and final versions as seperate datatypes.
• uploaded or generated documents should also be hashed simlarly
• final contracts and attached documents should be immutable
• make sure your audit trail keeps track of changes, exports, draft to final updates etc. The audit trail should be easily accessible.

[Baloshi69]

Your approach is spot on. Create a main ‘Contract’ data type for the high-level relationship, and a separate ‘Contract Version’ data type to hold the actual files and structured terms. This makes versioning (e.g., SOW v1, v2) clean and links everything to one parent contract.