Review your Terms of Trade.

Lesson 7

Having a System

Your business and the requirements.

Reviewing your terms of trade is an important task and one that should be high on your list of priorities. Over the years of running my debt collection agency it has surprised me how many businesses don't have this one important document for their business. I can't stress enough that every business should have terms and conditions. They are the rules of your business and without them no one knows where they stand.

We take the process of reviewing your terms of trade very seriously

In our premium service, we do a discovery session on this one subject, we take it very seriously because it saves a lot of money when it comes to disputes and people not knowing where they stand

I have included some the information about the terms of trade discovery session here, so you can get an idea of what it is.

The discovery session is the most important part of creating your custom terms of trade, it’s the time we get to find out about your business and the requirements for making sure we get the terms of trade right.

In this session, you get to communicate with us about any problems, or specific clauses you may require and it is our chance to cross reference your data with what we believe should be included to ensure nothing is missed.

Below is a list of items that should be on your terms of trade, but every industry and business have different obligations, so creating a one size fits all won’t work.  

Here we have set out to demonstrate the importance of having terms of trade for your business, so this list may not work for you. Our aim is to help you understand how terms of trade can be structured specifically for you.

1. Billing structure
2. Late payment
3. Scheduling
4. Termination of services by client
5. Unforeseen or sudden termination of a job or ongoing services
6. Privacy policy

As you can see there are many things to think about when creating these documents and to demonstrate their importance we have provided a case study.

Case Study: This is an air-conditioning company that provides services in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to both commercial and consumer customers, they honestly believed they had everything covered.

This is a list of clauses we have found to be missing from their terms of trade, this client was 100% certain their terms of trade were sufficient and correct for their business.

1. There was no specific explanation or clear definition of the services they were providing
2. No terms about any pre-existing conditions on the premises or work sites they were attending
3. Nothing about bookings or arrangements for staff to attend jobs
4. No clauses protecting the customer if the company staff didn’t turn up
5. There were also no provision if no one was at the premises to give them access
6. This company had no OH&S policies in their contract
7. There was no clause regarding the termination of the contract, by either party

Further to the list above following are the gaps in their existing terms and conditions that required attention.

• Warranty conditions were not outlined fully in the contract and there was no reference to their responsibility within the trade practices act.  
• No outline of what happens if there is a delay of goods outside of their control.
• If work is required to be done by other trades people or businesses, where do they stand if the job is not up to standards and affects their quality of work.
• No conditions on the delivery of goods or return of goods, or amendments, what if there is a variation to the job specifics, there was no clear directive as to how to manage this.
• The contract had nothing about Credit Reporting or default listing for non-payment or the clauses pertaining to doing a credit check before commencement of work.
• There was no directors or personal guarantee.

I hope that we have been able to quickly demonstrate to you that terms and conditions are an important element to your customer service and business structure.

Please watch this tutorial on the discovery session

This tutorial is designed to give you a heads-up on what to expect and what you need to prepare for the discovery session.