EconomicoContracts
Contract first. Invoice from it.
Agree the pricing, scope, and payment terms before any work starts — on real, standardized open-source paper your agent fills in — then invoice straight from that contract, with every charge tied to your books.
A contract used to be a lawyer-and-Google-Docs project
"Deal's not closed til you have pen to paper and can invoice." Every founder learns that the hard way — and then learns the second half: papering the deal is its own slog. You pull a template off the internet, export a PDF, hand-edit the terms in prose, and email it. Or you over-lawyer a $5k engagement to feel safe. Either way "the contract" ends up as a document you only half-trust, sitting in a folder, with nothing tying it to the invoices that are supposed to follow.
Now a contract is a primitive your agent calls
Flip it around. Instead of hand-crafting an MSA from a blog template, your agent instantiates a standardized, open-source Common Paper agreement by reference and fills in the order form — the pricing, the scope, the payment terms. You're not drafting from scratch; you're pointing at attorney-reviewed paper and filling in the blanks. What comes out is a defensible legal artifact in minutes, no lawyer and no custom contract editor in the loop.
You talk; it papers the deal and sets up what you'll bill
You drive the whole thing through the agent you already use. Ask in plain language and it references the standard paper, fills the order form, and breaks the contract into billable obligations — one-off, recurring, or usage — so every invoice flows from the terms you agreed instead of ad-hoc line items. The deal's state is data, too: draft to offer to active, or rejected, terminated, expired, tracked in your books instead of a folder of PDFs. The same contract works for customer deals and vendor deals alike.
Set up a Common Paper MSA with Acme for a $4k/month retainer, then break it into monthly obligations so I can invoice against it.
When the deal changes, the old terms don't vanish
Deals move. A customer upgrades, trims their plan, or renews on fresh paper; a vendor renegotiates. Your agent amends the contract — a new set of terms with the date they take effect — or replaces it with one that supersedes the old. Either way the previous terms are kept, not painted over. So you can ask what a customer was paying last March and get the real answer, and your recurring revenue reconstructs at any past date instead of only showing where it stands today. Same for what you sell and what you buy.
The contract renders at your own business URL — and the invoices tie back to it
Every contract gets its own clean page at your business URL: drop it into an email, a portal, or your site, and your agent can pull up the same document right inside the chat. You render it and sign it however you already sign — on paper or your usual e-signature tool — and your agent tracks the status from offer to active. From there the invoices bill from the contract's obligations, and the revenue books behind them, so the deal you agreed and the money that follows it are the same connected record.
“Paper a $4,000-a-month advisory retainer with Arcadia Robotics on a Common Paper MSA, break it into monthly obligations, and invoice January.”
- Client
- Arcadia Robotics
- Fee
- $4,000 / month
- Status
- active
- recurring · $4,000 / month
- → consulting revenue
"Won't my customer still send their own paper and redline it?"
Often, yes — standard paper is the easy place to start, not the end of negotiation, and we don't pretend it is. But whichever document you land on, you capture the pricing, scope, and terms you agreed as obligations, so your billing never depends on whose paper won. That's the real point: billing flows from obligations on an active contract, and it's all one connected ledger your own agent runs — the contract becomes the obligations it bills and the revenue it books, instead of stitching a contract tool to a billing tool to your accounting. See invoicing and AR.
Get started
Point your agent at standard paper and let it invoice from the deal.
Connect the agent you already use and it papers your deals on standard terms, then bills straight from them.