🎓Setting up your rental agreement (PDF)
In this video, you'll learn:
- How to prepare and upload a PDF rental agreement in Storeganise for e-signing in the Customer Portal.
- Using a PDF editor to add "text form fields" that populate customer information automatically.
- Linking text form fields to Storeganise placeholder variables for customer details, rental price, and more.
- Uploading and saving the prepared PDF in the Management Portal.
- Previewing the completed agreement and conducting a test move-in to confirm that fields populate correctly.
By the end of this video, you’ll know how to set up a PDF rental agreement that integrates customer-specific data for a seamless booking experience in Storeganise.
Next up in this module: Enable your rental agreement per site.
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View the transcript
When a customer reserves a unit online through your Storeganise Customer Portal, you can require them to e-sign a rental agreement before completing their order. These agreements use dynamic templates that automatically populate the correct information for each order.To set up a rental agreement, go to the Settings section in your Storeganise Management Portal and select the Self Storage tab. If you already have a rental contract as a PDF, you can upload it here. However, you’ll need to prepare the PDF first by adding "text form fields" using a third-party PDF editor, such as Adobe Acrobat or Sejda, a free browser-based tool. These ‘text form fields’ are required in order to populate customer-specific information automatically.
To prepare your PDF, open your agreement in a PDF editor and add the text form fields for each data point you need to populate. These fields correspond with the placeholder variables in Storeganise. To view the available variables, click the "Variables" button in the Management Portal. This will display a list of all system variables, such as the customer’s phone number, the rental price, and any custom fields you’ve created.
Let’s look at an example in Sejda. Upload your PDF, click "Forms", then select "Text" under the "Form Fields" section. Place and resize the text box to fit the area where you want the variable to appear. Next, click "Field Properties" and enter the appropriate placeholder from the Variables list. For example, if we are placing a text form field for the user’s first name, we will copy and paste the variable "User First Name" in the field property. Hit Enter to save.
It’s essential to paste the variable into the "Field Properties", not into the text box itself. Otherwise, the value will be hardcoded into your agreement and won’t be updated with customer-specific information.
For another example, if you want to display the monthly rental price, create another "text form field," place and resize it appropriately, and open "Field Properties". Then, paste the variable "Rental Price" and hit Enter. Depending on your PDF editor, the steps may vary slightly, but the core process remains the same: use text form fields and link them to Storganize variables.
Once all the fields are set, click "Apply Changes" and download the prepared PDF. Now, return to the Management Portal. Under the "Self Storage Agreement Template" section, select PDF and click "Add PDF". Upload the prepared PDF from your computer and click Save.
To confirm everything is set up correctly, click Preview. This will open the PDF with sample data populated in the fields. Note that custom fields won’t show any content in this preview. After saving the agreement, it’s recommended that a test move-in be processed to ensure the document works as expected and all custom fields display correctly.