Marketing and creative agencies
What was in scope,settled by a document.
Build the scope of work from your own rate card, send it with your terms, and have the version the client actually agreed to, with the date they agreed it.
No credit card required.
PROP-004
Letter of engagement 2026/27
Prepared for Okafor Design Ltd by Hartley & Co
One-off fees
charged once
| Service | Fee |
|---|---|
| Annual accounts and corporation tax | |
| Subtotal | |
| VAT | |
| Total |
Fees are shown per billing period. Amounts for different periods are listed separately and are not added together.
Ready to go ahead?
The three documents
Terms once, scope every time.
The general terms
Liability, intellectual property, termination, confidentiality. Agreed once with a client and reused across everything you do for them.
The scope of work
The deliverables, the fee against each, what is not included, and the assumptions the price depends on. This is the document every scope argument turns on, and the one most often sent as a slide deck nobody signs.
The retainer
A monthly or quarterly fee with a defined allocation. Quoted with its period attached and never added into project fees to produce a single number.
Freelancer and subcontractor terms go through the same mechanics if you want them to. They are not what this page is about.
Where this sits in the account
At the start, and again every time the brief moves.
Agencies do not lose money on the first scope. They lose it on the fourth change to it, agreed verbally in a status call, never written down, and remembered differently by each side four months later.
This sits in front of whatever runs your delivery, at the point where what was bought is settled. Projects, time, resource and invoicing stay where they are; what sits here is the general terms, the priced scope of work, the signature and the evidence around all three.
Price from your own rate card
Keep your deliverables and day rates in one list. Building a scope is picking from it, so what the client signs and what you quoted are the same figures.
Send terms and scope as one pack
General terms and the scope of work go out together and complete as a single record with one certificate. On the next project the terms are already agreed and only the scope changes.
Re-scope by reissuing, never by editing
When the brief changes, send a revised scope and get it agreed. The original stays exactly as the client first saw it, with its own date.
Send the next scope of work through it before the work starts.
What you can prove when the account goes wrong
The argument for writing scopes down is commercial, and it comes due at one moment: when a client believes something was included and you believe it was added. What settles it is what can be produced. A dated document that neither side has altered since ends the conversation in a minute. An email thread with three attachments called scope_v2_FINAL does not, and the cost is the fortnight of work you absorb to protect the relationship.
The certificate
Produced automatically when the last signature lands. Each signature with its time, actor and IP address, a fingerprint of every document in the pack, and a QR code linking to an independent check.
Checkable without you
A client or their adviser can verify a completed document 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.
Verify a document →CecurSign
Certificate of Completion
Envelope information
- Envelope ID
- 9c1f2a34-5b6d-4e71-8f90-2ad4c6e13b58
- 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
What you would actually be using
The parts of CecurSign that matter to marketing and creative agencies, and what each one does here.
Templates
General terms agreed once with a client and reused on every piece of work after that, which is the split the industry's own framework agreements already use.
Build a document once with its fields, its signers and its reminders, then send it as often as you need without rebuilding it.
Your service list
Your deliverables and day rates in one list, so a scope is built by picking from it and a rate rise reaches every future scope at once.
Every service you sell with its fee, how often it is charged and its VAT treatment, held in one place rather than in three versions of a spreadsheet.
Priced documents
The scope of work priced deliverable by deliverable, with the retainer keeping its own monthly period rather than being folded into the project fee.
Build a priced document from that list, send it as a branded page, and have the client agreeing to it be the signature on it.
Client records
What each client has agreed to and what is currently in force, without going through an inbox to find out.
Your clients, their documents, and whether each one is currently under an agreement, worked out from what they actually signed.
Certificate of completion
Which version of the scope the client agreed, and when. That is the entire argument when somebody says a deliverable was always included.
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 agencies ask before they buy
Short answers to the ones that come up first.
Is this a project management tool?
Our clients never sign anything. They just reply "approved".
Do retainers renew automatically?
More detail on how a priced document is built and what the client sees on the proposals page, or see how other companies use it on the industries index.
See the document itself
The whole thing, section by section, with the priced schedule attached. Free to read, and nothing to sign up for.
These show structure rather than wording, and where your professional body publishes model wording you should use theirs. Every one we publish is in the specimen gallery.
The four things it does, in your documents
The product does the same four jobs for every firm. This is what each one looks like in yours, and each page describes the job in full.
Proposals and engagement letters
The scope goes out priced deliverable by deliverable from your rate card and is accepted before the kick-off, so the first day of work has a signed scope behind it.
Proposals and engagement lettersClient onboarding
A new client agrees your general terms once, and reads your ways of working and your rate card beside them, with a record of what they opened.
Client onboardingContracts and renewals
A retainer that carries an end date tells you ahead of it, and a change in the work is a fresh scope, signed again, with the old one left as agreed.
Contracts and renewalsSelf sign
A pitch declaration, a supplier form a client sends as a PDF, or an internal sign-off: signed by you alone, in one sitting.
Signing something yourselfWhat to read next
The parts of the help centre this page assumes, in the order you would meet them.
- Building a proposalAdding services, writing the letter, and previewing what the client will get.
- Pricing, cadences and VATFixed fees, hourly work, estimates, recurring charges, and how each is shown to the client.
- Sending a proposal, and what the client seesWhat is fixed at the moment you send, and the page your client opens.
- I sent it with a mistake in itCorrecting a document that is already out, without losing what was signed.
Everything else is in the help centre.
Put your next scope of work through it
Build one from your own rate card, send it to a real client, and look at what comes back.
No credit card required.