How do I actually keep track of which contracts are still unsigned?

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Lost-track contracts aren't usually lost because nobody cares, they're lost because tracking them lives entirely in memory and inbox scrolling, which works fine with two or three open deals and quietly breaks down somewhere past that. The fix isn't working harder at remembering, it's moving the tracking out of your head and into something you check on a fixed schedule, whether that's a simple list or a tool's built-in dashboard.

The no-tool way: a spreadsheet, checked weekly

A spreadsheet with one row per contract, columns for sent date, opened (if you can tell), signed, and next-follow-up-date, costs nothing and works genuinely well for a small number of open deals, under about ten at once. The discipline required is checking and updating it on a set schedule, weekly at minimum, rather than only when a specific deal happens to come to mind. Past ten open contracts, manually updating a spreadsheet every time something changes starts eating real time that a tool with automatic status tracking would save you.

PandaDoc

PandaDoc, a document platform built for creating, tracking, and signing contracts and proposals with built-in workflow automation, confirmed live, offers tracking and reporting on its plans, with basic tracking on Free and Starter and more advanced reporting on Business, at $49 a seat a month, and above. If your proposals already live in PandaDoc for building and sending, the tracking comes along as part of the same workflow rather than a separate step.

SignWell

SignWell, an e-signature tool built for sending documents for signature without requiring recipients to create an account, confirmed live, includes tracking across all its tiers, including the Free plan at $0 a month, though that tier's 3-document-a-month cap limits how much active pipeline you can realistically track on it. The Light plan, at $12 a month ($10 a month billed annually), removes that document cap while keeping tracking included.

The old-school alternative: print, sign, scan

Some small businesses still handle this entirely on paper, printing a contract, getting it signed in person, and scanning it back into a folder. This has zero ongoing software cost and genuinely works fine for a low volume of in-person deals, but it offers no automatic tracking at all, you're entirely dependent on a human remembering to check in on anything that hasn't come back signed yet, which is exactly the failure mode this whole page is about fixing.

QuickSigner

QuickSigner is an e-signature tool built around a flat price per user with no document caps, aimed at being simpler and cheaper than larger established platforms. Tracking who's opened, signed, or not signed yet, along with reports across your sent documents, is included from its Business plan up, confirmed live at $5 a month per user ($48 a year), not on the Free tier. For a business juggling more than a handful of open contracts at once, this is one of the clearest arguments for stepping up from Free to Business specifically, separate from the template or reminder features.

Setting it up, four steps

1. List all open contracts currently out for signature, starting with whatever you can reconstruct from memory and your email right now, as a one-time baseline.
2. Mark sent, opened, and signed status for each one, whether that's manual in a spreadsheet or automatic through a tool's dashboard. Open tracking is explained in seeing if a customer opened your quote.
3. Check the list weekly, at minimum, as a fixed habit rather than an occasional check when a specific deal happens to cross your mind.
4. Use a spreadsheet when you have fewer than ten open contracts, and move to a tool with automatic tracking once that volume makes manual updates a genuine time drain rather than a quick task.

A worked example

Say you've got 15 proposals out at any given time, a mix of quotes and service agreements. Tracked manually, keeping that spreadsheet current means updating it every time you check an email for a reply, which realistically means it drifts out of date within days, since checking fifteen individual email threads for status updates isn't something most people do consistently. Tracked through a tool with built-in status, you open one dashboard once a week and see, at a glance, which of the 15 are signed, which are opened but unsigned, and which haven't even been opened yet, the last category being the one that most urgently needs a different approach (a call, not another email) since a document that's never been opened isn't being quietly considered, it's being ignored, often because it landed in a spam folder, got sent to the wrong address, or simply never reached the top of someone's inbox.

The part that actually recovers lost revenue

Here's what I'd tell a client directly: the tracking tool only pays for itself if you actually act on what it shows you. I've seen businesses set up a perfectly good tracking dashboard, check it occasionally, notice three contracts have been sitting unopened for two weeks, and then do nothing differently because noticing isn't the same as following up. The dashboard's real value isn't visibility for its own sake, it's visibility that triggers a specific next action, a call for anything unopened past a certain point, a reminder for anything opened but unsigned. Set that trigger explicitly, don't just glance at the numbers and move on.

Building the follow-up trigger into the process itself

A reasonable default rule: anything unopened after three days gets a direct call, anything opened but unsigned after seven days gets a personal follow-up message, not just an automated reminder, and anything still unsigned after fourteen days gets a conversation about whether the deal is actually still moving forward at all. Wording for those nudges is in reminding customers to sign a document and stop chasing. Write that rule down somewhere visible, not just in your head, so it survives you being busy or on vacation for a week. If you work with anyone else, a part-time assistant, a bookkeeper, a partner, who could plausibly check the tracking dashboard and make that call in your place, write the rule down for them too. The goal is making the follow-up happen reliably regardless of who's available to notice the unsigned contract that week.

When a spreadsheet is genuinely fine

If your contract volume is low and steady, a handful a month, a disciplined spreadsheet is a completely reasonable long-term solution, and switching to a paid tracking tool purely for this feature at that volume is probably not worth the cost. The upgrade becomes worth it specifically when volume grows past what you can realistically keep current by hand, not at some fixed universal number. For a month-end view, see getting a monthly list of signed and unsigned jobs.

Don't let tracking replace a clear owner on each deal

If more than one person on your team sends contracts, a shared dashboard alone can create a different failure mode: everyone assumes someone else is watching a specific unsigned contract, and nobody actually calls. Assign a specific owner to each open deal, visible in the tracking tool itself if it supports that, rather than relying on "the team" generally to notice and act. A shared view of who on your team sent which contract helps here. A tracking system with no clear single owner per contract tends to produce the same gaps a spreadsheet did, just with better-looking data behind it, which is a trap worth naming explicitly before it happens rather than discovering it after a contract has already slipped through unnoticed.

How I'd approach this

When a client's real problem is money sitting in unsigned deals nobody's following up on, I look first at whether the gap is visibility (they genuinely don't know what's outstanding) or follow-through (they know, but nothing happens next). Those need different fixes, and a tracking tool alone only solves the first one. Get in touch if you want a contract pipeline built that actually drives follow-up action, not just a dashboard.