The life of a document
A document is not a file. It is a process with a file at the end.
Ask a company what it has agreed to, with whom, and what renews next quarter, and somebody opens a shared drive. The files are there. Everything that gave them meaning — who approved what, which version was signed, what it commits you to — is somewhere else, or nowhere.
Here is the whole life of one document, in six stages, with no words you would have to look up.
Scroll, or pick a stage from the list. About two minutes.
01
It starts before the document does
Every contract your company sends is the same document
The wording barely changes. What changes is a handful of details — who, when, how much. So the sensible thing to keep is not a hundred finished contracts, but the shape they all share: the fixed part written once, and blanks where the details go.
That shape is a template. Everything else on this page follows from having one.
02
Filling the blanks
The blanks are answers, not typing
A name, a date, an amount. Each blank knows what kind of answer belongs in it, so a date cannot end up in the price and nobody retypes a customer's name that already exists somewhere in your systems.
Which is why the same details can arrive from a form, a spreadsheet, or the system you already run your business on.
03
Where agreements are actually made
Both sides change it, and every change is kept
Your draft goes out. Theirs comes back marked up, or arrives on their paper instead of yours. Somewhere across a few rounds is the thing you both sign. Every version is kept — yours and theirs — so you can see who changed which clause, compare any two, and put back a sentence that quietly went missing three rounds ago.
Not a folder ending in final-v3-USE-THIS. One document you can rewind, so when two people remember a clause differently it is a lookup rather than an argument.
04
Getting agreement on your own side
It goes to whoever has to approve it
In order, or to several people at once, depending on what it is. A small renewal might need one person. An unusual liability cap goes further, and to different people. The point is that the path is decided in advance rather than improvised over email at five o'clock.
Each approval is attached to the exact version approved — so a change afterwards does not inherit the yes.
05
Making it binding
Signing seals it shut
Both sides sign, and the finished file is sealed. Sealed means something specific: change a single character afterwards and the seal no longer matches the document. Anyone can check that, years later, without asking you.
This is the difference between a file that says it was signed and a file that can prove it.
06
Long after everyone has moved on
The document is still working
It joins everything else you have signed, findable by what is inside it rather than what the file was called. Which supplier. Which liability cap. Which one expires in March. And because the dates inside it are answers rather than sentences, it can tell you ninety days before it renews instead of the week after.
Most of what a contract costs you happens in the years after it is signed. That is the part almost nobody has a system for, and the reason a document is a process rather than a file.
What that was called
You have just read a definition of contract lifecycle management
There is an industry behind each of those stages, and a phrase for the whole thing depending on who is selling: contract lifecycle management, document management, enterprise content management. The serious ones broadly agree about the six stages — they have had thirty years to.
What they answer differently is quieter, and it is the only question this page is really about. While all six stages are happening — while your pricing, your terms and your counterparties are moving through them — whose computers are those documents sitting on?
Wraft does the same six stages. It runs on machines you control, under a licence nobody can withdraw, and you can read every line of how it works. That is the whole of the difference, and the rest of this page is what it looks like to use.
In practice
What you actually do is five things
The six stages above are what happens to a document, over months, mostly without you watching. These five are what a person sits down and does. Pick one to see it, or let it run.
Start from a template, a variant of one, or nothing at all
Most documents already have a shape in your organisation. Take it, take a variation of it for a particular case, or start from a blank page and make a new one — the first document you write becomes the template for the next hundred.
Why it is worth the trouble
Three things that stop being your problem
One place, not five
The shape, the versions, the approvals, the signature and the archive are one system. Nothing has to be kept in step with a spreadsheet, because there is no spreadsheet — and no stage where the document is handed to a different tool and comes back thinner.
Provable, not just recorded
Every version, approval and signature is bound to the document rather than filed next to it. When an auditor, a regulator or the other side asks what was agreed and when, the answer is in the document instead of in somebody's memory of an inbox.
It stays yours
All six stages run on infrastructure you control, under a licence that cannot be withdrawn. The documents stay readable whether or not you keep using Wraft — which is what every other answer on this page quietly depends on.
That is the whole idea, and it is deliberately the least impressive claim on this site: the same six stages everyone agrees on, at an address you chose. If you want the version with the architecture in it, there is one — and if you would rather skip the argument and read the code, all of it is public.