- How do you engage clients and provide your terms?
- Online (through your website, or by email)
- By clients completing an order form?
- By agreeing a specification or scope with your client?
Terms of business: key considerations
Terms of business set out the basics of your relationship with your client. They state your obligations to each other and must be effectively incorporated into your relationship.
- Do you sell to one or the other, or both? Separate terms might be needed for consumers and businesses
- Consumers are protected by consumer law, which restrict what you can include in your terms, and make you set out certain consumer rights
- Businesses may want to negotiate your terms, making compromises in the terms might avoid this
- Consumer terms generally use simpler wording.
- Will there be any intellectual property you want to protect or which is developed as a result of your relationship?
- Do you retain all ownership of the intellectual property?
- What rights do you grant to clients to use them?
- Does the client provide any intellectual property?
- How (and in how much detail) you will set out, or agree, the specification
- Will you agree specifications or statements of work on a case-by-case basis?
- Are there any deliverables?
- Any approval/acceptance process?
- Fixed or time and materials?
- Extra rates for overtime?
- For day rates – how many working hours? Do you pro-rate or charge for half-days?
- When and how will you increase fees?
- What expenses you will charge for?
- Do you lock clients in for a minimum term?
- Does that term automatically renew?
- How much notice is needed to terminate?
- Are you prepared to give a warranty in relation to the services?
- Are the warranties subject to any conditions?
- What procedure do clients go through if they claim under a warranty?
- What specification or details will apply to the goods, and how they will be provided to the client
- What the client can do with the goods if they only pay after receiving them
- What conditions or guidance you might have around use or storage of the goods
- How delivery (and risk in transit) are dealt with
- When does title to the goods pass?
- If any goods will be made to order.
- What is the price of the goods?
- How and when is payment expected to be made?
- Do you want to be able to vary the price of the goods from time to time?
- What expenses you will charge for?
- Term and minimum commitments