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The appointment agreed in writing,before stage one.

Send the terms of appointment and the schedule of services as one pack, get them signed before stage one, and keep a record of what was agreed and when.

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Hartley & Co

Letter of engagement 2026/27

From: R. Hartley, Hartley & Co

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The signing page's header, with one required field still to fill. For an architect, that is the terms of appointment, signed before stage one. Composed from a test document; Finish stays disabled until every required field is filled, and the document itself is below the frame.

The three documents

The third one is where the fee is usually lost.

The terms of appointment

Who the parties are, the scope of the services, the fee or how it is calculated, and who is responsible for what. Agreed in writing before the work begins, and it is the document this product carries.

The schedule of services

Set out by work stage, which is how practices actually work. Each stage appears as its own line, so a client can see what they are committing to at each point instead of a lump sum with a schedule buried in an appendix.

The additional services instruction

Where the fee argument actually happens: a change of brief, a re-design after planning, an extra consultant to coordinate. Send the instruction from the same template and get it signed before the work is done, rather than adding it to the final account and hoping.

Sub-consultant appointments and letters of intent go through the same mechanics if you want them to.

Where this sits in the project

At the very front of it, and nowhere else.

The appointment is the first thing on a project and the one most often handled informally, because everybody is keen to start. Agreed after a dispute has started, it is not an appointment, it is a negotiating position.

This sits at the very front of the project, before stage one. What we carry is the terms, the schedule of services, the additional services instruction, the signature and the evidence around all four. Drawings, consultants and the building contract stay wherever they are today.

Build the appointment once and reuse it

Keep the appointment as a template with your stages, your clauses and your signature blocks already in it: the stages you routinely run, the surveys, the consultant coordination. The next one is a change of scope rather than an evening.

Send it before the work starts, not after

The appointment goes out as one pack: the terms, the schedule of services and anything that has to travel with them. It is signed and dated before the first stage, which is what makes the fee collectable.

Keep what settles the argument

Every send, open and signature is recorded with its time and IP address, and the completed appointment produces a certificate. When a client says two years later that a stage was included, the answer is a document rather than a memory.

Send your next appointment through it.

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What settles a fee dispute

The ARB, the UK architects’ regulator, requires the terms of an appointment to be agreed and recorded in writing before any professional service begins, and it has acted on it. The failure is rarely a practice that refuses to write terms. It is a practice that sent them, started work, varied the scope twice by email, and now cannot show which version was agreed. That is an evidence problem, and it is the one this product is built for.

The certificate

Produced automatically when the last signature lands. It lists each signature with its time, actor and IP address, a fingerprint of every document in the appointment, and a QR code linking to an independent check.

Checkable without you

A client, their solicitor or an adjudicator can verify a completed appointment themselves, with no account and no login. It confirms the document, the signers and that the chain is intact, without disclosing what the document said.

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CecurSign

Certificate of Completion

Completed
Subject
Letter of engagement 2026/27
Created
04/06/2026 09:12 UTC
Sent
04/06/2026 09:14 UTC
Completed
05/06/2026 16:41 UTC

Documents

Engagement letter and schedules.pdf (7 pages)

SHA-256: a4f1c9e0b7d3

Signers and recipients

  • R. Hartley (Signer)Signed 04/06/2026 11:02 UTC
  • J. Okafor (Signer)Signed 05/06/2026 16:41 UTC

Scan to verify

Envelope ID

9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58

The certificate a completed appointment produces. Shown with details from a test document.

What you would actually be using

The parts of CecurSign that matter to architects, and what each one does here.

Templates

The additional services instruction, kept ready to send the day the scope moves. That document is where the fee argument actually happens, and the usual reason it is lost is that nobody stopped to write one.

Build a document once with its fields, its signers and its reminders, then send it as often as you need without rebuilding it.

Sending for signature

Terms of appointment signed before stage one, which is while it is still an easy conversation, and signed by every party to the appointment rather than by whoever answered the email.

One person or several, in a set order or all at once, with a deadline and a copy to whoever else needs one.

Supporting material

Your fee basis, your professional indemnity position and your obligations under the appointment travel beside it to be read rather than signed, and you can see which the client opened before stage one starts.

The things that are read rather than signed, sent alongside the document instead of stapled into it, with a record of who opened what.

Reminders

An appointment that went out and never came back is chased on its own, so work does not quietly begin on an unagreed fee.

Chases that go out on a set pattern while something is unsigned, a nudge you can send by hand, and a deadline you set yourself.

Certificate of completion

What was agreed, when, and for which stages, produced months later without reconstructing it from an email thread.

Produced when the last signature lands: every signature with its time, the person who made it and their IP address, and a fingerprint of each file.

What practices ask before they buy

Short answers to the four that come up most.

Is an electronically signed appointment legally binding?
Yes, for the ordinary business documents on this page: the appointment, the schedule of services and the additional services instruction. What settles a dispute is the record of who agreed, when and from where, and that is what every completed appointment carries. Deeds, which is what a collateral warranty usually is, wills and land transactions need extra formality and are not for this.
Our fees run per work stage. Does that survive on the document?
Yes. Each stage is its own line with its own fee, and the letter prints them as a schedule rather than collapsing them into one figure. A recurring fee, such as a monthly retainer during construction, is quoted with its period attached and is never added into the one-off stage fees.
The brief changes after the appointment is signed. What then?
Reissue the additional services instruction from the same template with the new scope and fee, and get it agreed before the work is done. It is a fresh signature rather than an edit to the signed appointment, so the original stays exactly as agreed. Two years later you can show both.
Does this replace the software we already run the practice on?
No, it sits beside it. Project management, drawing issue and your submissions stay where they are. This carries the appointment, the fee and the evidence around them, and nothing else.

More detail on how a document is sent, signed and proved on the e-signature page, or see how other companies use it on the industries index.

How it fits your documents

Send a document for signature, or sign one yourself. This is what each looks like in your line of work.

E-signature

The client reads your terms, your fee basis and your professional obligations beside the appointment, and you know which they opened before stage one starts.

Sending for signature

Self sign

A planning declaration, a certificate for a client's lender, or a form the council sent as a PDF: signed by you alone, in one sitting, and filed with a record.

Signing something yourself

What to read next

The parts of the help centre this page assumes, in the order you would meet them.

Everything else is in the help centre.

Put your next appointment through it

Build one from your own stages, send it to a real client, and look at the certificate that comes back.

Start 14-day free trial

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