Overview

Google Workspace is our flexible platform for when we don‘t have a better platform to handle a specific need. Most days you won’t need to interact with it aside from checking your email.

We use Google Docs for documents that require traditional formatting and writing tools. We try not to use Google Docs but just use it for stuff it is specifically good at.

We use Google Sheets as our standard spreadsheet tool.

We use Google Slides as a basic presentation tool. Figma is better, but for fast presentations Slides is fine.

📏 Rules for Google Docs

✅ Do…

• Use Google Docs for Legal Paperwork
• Use Google Docs for Proposals
• Use Google Docs for presentations if you don‘t know how to use Figma

🚫 Don’t…

• Use Google Docs for working project docs, meeting notes, or anything else that doesn’t have to be in Docs.
• Use Google Docs for anything that doesn’t have a more specific home, such as databases, code, design work, etc.

Why we use it

All the Google products are rock solid. Gmail is an industry leader, Google Drive is great, Calendar/Docs/Slides/Sheets are all quite good. We like to use more specialized tools like Notion, but there are plenty of cases where a good old Google Doc is required.

How we use it

• Every team member has an email address. Most days you won’t get internal email. You may be on client threads or handling inbound email traffic depending on your role.
• Every client has a Team Drive in Google Drive. This contains their contract & SOWs along with project files that don’t fit neatly into any of the other platforms.
• We use Google Docs for our discovery reports.

eSignatures

To set up an eSignature, Tools → eSignature. Using the sidebar, you can manage up to 10 people who will be signing the document. For each person signing, you can drag-and-drop fields onto the document for them to sign. Most of the time, you will want a Signature field and a Date field for everybody involved.

Note that if you have multiple signers, you’ll need to manually select which signer you are adding fields for (use the select option of “Insert Fields For” and pick the appropriate name, the same select option you used to Manage Signers). An easy mistake is to add several signing fields, but they’re all for the same signer!

This select option is important for adding and removing signers, as well as selecting which signers will have to sign what fields.

This (unimaginative) contract has two signature fields: One for Alice and one for Bob, indicated by color.

If you make a mistake - for instance, not assigning fields to the right person - you can directly click on a field to change who it’s assigned to.

Once you have finished, click Request eSignature, add the email addresses and a message, and send. If your document has had changes recently, you’ll be prompted to review the changes first, then you can send.

This will output a PDF, which will be in Google Drive. You should eventually move this PDF to the appropriate client folder.