Signing was never the slow part

A signature tool ends the job. Paqt does the job

Both produce a legally signed document. Only one of them was present for the agreement that document records.

• Signature-only workflow: The document arrives finished; the tool has no view of how it got that way
• Signature-only workflow: Negotiation happens in email and tracked changes, so the reasoning lives in a thread nobody can search later
• Signature-only workflow: A signed PDF is the record — flat, un-diffable, and silent about which clause moved and why
• Signature-only workflow: Approvals are collected out of band, then asserted rather than evidenced
• Signature-only workflow: Amendments restart the whole cycle in the same scattered tools
• Signature-only workflow: Nothing extracts the obligations you just committed to
• Paqt: The conversation, the draft and the signature share one room, so the record starts at the first message
• Paqt: Negotiation happens clause by clause, with each position attributable to a party and a version
• Paqt: The signed agreement keeps its full version history and negotiation log attached
• Paqt: Approvals bind to a specific version and an identity, so who accepted what is a matter of record
• Paqt: Amendments attach to the clause they change, leaving the operative agreement readable
• Paqt: Obligations, notice periods and renewal dates are extracted from the executed document

Everything that happens before the signature

This is not a longer list of signing features. It is the work that currently happens outside the signing tool, brought inside one record.

• The thread that caused the deal — Negotiation starts as a conversation. Keeping it beside the document means the intent behind a clause is still there when someone asks about it in a year.
• Your paper, authored here — Templates and a clause library your team owns, so a first draft is generated from approved language rather than from the last deal someone copied.
• Clause-level negotiation — Propose, counter and accept at the level of the clause. Each position is a tracked act with an author, not an untracked edit in a file attachment.
• An assistant that takes turns — Inside a mandate you set, the assistant drafts, counters, chases the counterparty and escalates the terms you named — rather than waiting for you to do each turn.
• Signature as a step, not a product — Signing happens in the same room, with identity capture and a signature audit trail, at the moment the negotiation finishes.
• A record that keeps working — After execution the agreement still answers questions: what the operative terms are, when notice is due, which amendment changed which clause.

A PDF cannot tell you what you agreed

The limitation is not a missing feature; it is the data model. A flat signed file has no clauses, no parties on a position, and no history — so every downstream question becomes a manual read.

• Clauses are addressable — An agreement in Paqt is a structure of clauses, each with its own version history, so “when did the indemnity change” has a direct answer.
• Every move is attributed — Positions, approvals, overrides and agent actions each carry an identity and a timestamp in one tamper-evident history.
• Amendments resolve — A change attaches to the clause it modifies instead of arriving as a separate document you have to reconcile by hand.
• Obligations come out — Term, notice, renewal and the commitments you made are extracted from the executed agreement rather than re-read out of it later.

When you should not switch

A signature tool is the right tool for a lot of work, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. The question is whether your bottleneck is execution or agreement. If it is execution, you already have what you need.

Paqt signs natively, with identity capture and a signature audit trail, so moving the negotiation here does not mean keeping a second tool for execution.

• Keep what you have when: Your documents arrive finished and the only remaining task is collecting signatures
• Keep what you have when: The paper never changes — a standard form nobody negotiates
• Keep what you have when: Your signing flow is already embedded in another system's checkout or onboarding step
• Keep what you have when: You need a specific signature format or jurisdictional profile that is a procurement requirement in its own right
• Move to Paqt when: The time is going into the negotiation, the approvals and the chasing — not the signing
• Move to Paqt when: You cannot answer “what did we actually agree” without opening a folder and reading
• Move to Paqt when: Volume is the problem and you want an assistant to run the ordinary turns under a mandate
• Move to Paqt when: Obligations, renewals and amendments keep getting rediscovered too late

The questions this raises

• Does Paqt actually sign, or does it hand off to something else? It signs. Signature happens in the same room as the negotiation, with identity capture, a per-signer audit trail and the executed version retained alongside the history that produced it. There is no handoff and no second subscription.
• Why do you not compare yourself to specific products by name? Because we would have to describe someone else's current feature set accurately, and a marketing page is the wrong place to do that — it would be out of date within weeks. We compare the categories, describe our own behaviour precisely, and let you test the claims in a free room.
• Can we keep negotiating in a word processor and still use Paqt? You can, but you lose most of the point. Clause-level history, attribution and obligation extraction all come from negotiating inside the structured document. Pasting a finished draft in to sign works; it just makes Paqt into the narrower tool you already have.
• What happens to agreements we already signed elsewhere? Bring them in as documents and they become part of the record you can search, reference and amend from. They will not retroactively gain a clause-level negotiation history, because that history never existed — but every agreement from that point forward will have one.