Summary

Legal bumph fills us with as much joy as it probably does you, but these terms of service are a necessary part of any work we take on, minimising risk for us both. We believe in building genuine working relationships with people through personal service and ethical trading. So, our terms of service are written to be as fair as possible.

Please read this carefully, and do get in touch if anything is unclear or you have any questions. While we use these terms as a framework for the way we like to work, we’re open to suggestions.

These terms were last reviewed on 14 November 2022.

Our agreement when working together

These are the terms of service for As It Should Be Ltd (“the company”, “us”, “we”, “our”). By agreeing to work with us, you are agreeing to the following terms and conditions. We may update these terms and conditions at any time, and we give existing clients notice when changes are made. The latest version can always be found on this page.

Please note that other terms and conditions won’t be accepted unless agreed in writing in advance.

How we approach projects

  1. We’re a responsible company committed to working in an ethical way, and we like to work with customers who share our values. We will not knowingly work with organisations engaging in contentious activities or working in unethical sectors. With this in mind, we reserve the right to refuse to work on projects that are deemed to be illegal, immoral or otherwise contentious. This includes, but is not limited by, projects that raise concerns around environmental damage, human rights, workers’ rights, fossil fuels, gambling, human trafficking, promoting hate, sexual exploitation, tobacco, weapons, etc.
  2. We value transparency and collaboration in our work, so we like working in partnerships and not behind “white labels”. If we’re working with you for one of your clients, we want everyone to open and honest about it. It builds trust and accountability, avoids trouble, and allows us to celebrate our work together.
  3. Once we understand your needs, we put together a proposal and quote for you to review before we start work. The quote is valid for one calendar month from the issue date. It tells you costs both including and excluding VAT at the rate applicable at the time it’s issued. Please note that invoices will include VAT applied at the rate applicable at the time they’re raised.
  4. Accepting a proposal and quote indicates that you agree to these terms of service. These terms and conditions then form our agreement for the work outlined in the proposal. If appropriate, any variations to these terms may be agreed in writing.
  5. Before starting the project, we will work with you to produce a more detailed statement of work based on an accepted proposal. This will be the blueprint for the work to do, including activities and timelines. You can make changes to work within reason and provided you give us fair notice (see “Making changes during a project”).
  6. We can’t always guarantee to start work immediately. Proposals will normally include a suggested timeline, but we will arrange a start date and delivery schedule with you once a proposal has been accepted. We’ll include these in the statement of work.
  7. We aim to minimise any disruption to the agreed work, but sometimes things go wrong that are out of our control. We try to ensure plans are in place to minimise risk, but we can’t account for delays that are out of our hands. If a delivery schedule is not part of the statement of work for any reason, we will deliver the agreed work within a reasonable time.
  8. We’re remote workers—we always have been—and we’ve made a commitment to avoid unnecessary travel where possible. This doesn’t mean that we don’t travel to our clients’ offices when it’s necessary to do so. We do like to keep our carbon footprint low and our costs down, though. If you want to meet us in person, please note that we actively avoid flying, preferring to travel by land using public transport.

Making changes during a project

  1. For changes made once we have an approved statement of work, we will work with you to make reasonable adjustments. We will produce a revised quote detailing any work that falls outside the original scope of the project and extra charges for that. Accepting a revised quote indicates that you understand that the changes are an addition to the original proposal.
  2. In some cases, we may suggest that we produce a fresh quote for the work. This will mean that a new proposal and quote would replace the original proposal and quote.
  3. When working under a retainer agreement, there may be periods when you don’t need us. We expect you to give us fair notice of any such changes to your needs. Please give us no less than 30 days’ notice. For example, if you won’t be needing us in February, you must let us know at the beginning of January.
  4. For other types of work, we expect you to give us 14 days’ notice of changes.

Cancelling work

  1. If you decide to cancel working with us, talk to us—we won’t get upset. You should cancel a project by giving us written notice by email, but we might like to talk to you about it on a call.
  2. If you cancel before the scheduled start date agreed in the statement of work, we won’t charge you.
  3. If you wish to cancel a project after the scheduled start date, we will charge you for all the work done up to the date that you wrote to us to cancel the work. If you cancel under a retainer agreement, we will hold any unused time that you’ve paid for in advance for up to 6 months.
  4. In cases where you’ve paid a deposit to secure work from us, we will consider issuing a refund if it seems fair to do so.
  5. In the unlikely event that we decide to stop working with you, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice.

Pricing

  1. Our prices change from time to time, but we aim to give plenty of notice—no less than 30 days.
  2. Changes to prices don’t affect any current valid quotes or the agreed cost of scheduled projects. Quotes for future work will reflect price changes.

How to pay us

  1. We will email you invoices with one of the following schedules:
    1. For small projects, we usually invoice within 7 days of completing the work.
    2. For big projects, we may ask you to pay 25% of the full charges before we start work. We’ll include a full payment schedule in the statement of work.
    3. For training courses, we normally ask for a 50% deposit payment once you accept a proposal and quote. Once we have received this, we’ll reserve the scheduled training dates. We’ll invoice the rest when we’ve completed the training.
    4. When working under a retainer agreement, we’ll send invoices monthly, usually on the first working day of each month.
    5. For other services provided on an ongoing basis, we’ll send invoices on the last working day of each month.
  2. The payment methods we accept are on our invoices along with the necessary bank details. We prefer Direct Debit payments or bank transfers. We don’t think we’ve seen a cheque in over a decade, which is rather good since our bank now charges quite a bit for handling them. We’d really appreciate you not paying us by cheque.
  3. The full balance of all invoices is due 14 days after we issue an invoice, unless we’ve agreed and stated otherwise. We do understand that payments can take longer to new suppliers or in difficult circumstances, though.
  4. We may feel it’s necessary to change the payment terms for your project. We’ll clearly state any variation in payment terms in our proposal or statement of work. This won’t affect any other terms of service.
  5. When working under a retainer agreement, we won’t expect you to pay for periods when you don’t need us. You must give us fair notice of such periods (see “Making changes during a project”).
  6. If you’re late paying us, we’ll check in with you to make sure you’ve received our invoice and that everything is okay. If there’s ever a problem making payment, please do get in touch with us to discuss it.
  7. If we don’t receive payment within 30 days of an invoice and we haven’t made other arrangements, we may decide to charge you interest and associated costs.

Privacy

  1. We work hard to protect your privacy and personal information. We will never disclose or share anything you tell us without you saying it’s okay, unless we are required to by law.
  2. We review our data protection practices every year to make sure they are up to date and meet the European Parliament’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).
  3. For more details of how we collect, use and protect any information you give us, see our privacy policy.
  1. All material, both text and images, supplied by you will remain yours. You are responsible for securing all necessary licenses or permissions for the content you supply. We’ll assume that what you supply is your property and that we are free to use it during the project without breaching copyright laws.
  2. All material provided by us or our suppliers for your project will remain the property of the company and its suppliers until payment for the work has been made in full. This may include code, graphics, photographs, images and text. Once we receive payment, all materials written specifically for the project will become yours.
  3. Code examples and other such materials remain our intellectual property, but you’re granted permission to use these as part of the project.
  4. Materials from third parties will be licensed to you for your use, but remains owned by the third party.
  5. Our brand identity, logo and associated trademarks belong to us. We grant you permission to use these in an appropriate way should you like to tell others about our work together.

Celebrating our work together

  1. We like to celebrate good work, telling others what we achieve together and sharing what we’ve learned in the process. This might be by featuring the work we did together on our website, talking about it on social media, or using it sometimes in other publicity. So, we’d like to celebrate our work with you, too. If you’d rather we didn’t, we respect that—just write to us to let us know.
  2. We’re proud to work with great clients. (Like you?) So, of course we want to add client logos to our clients list or testimonials. If it’s okay with you, we’re going to assume that you’re happy for us to use your organisation’s name and logo on our website. Again, if you’d rather we didn’t, please write to us to let us know.
  3. As we say above, you’re welcome to use our company name and logo if you’d like to tell others about our work together.

Should things go wrong

  1. We aim to always provide an excellent service that results in positive outcomes. If we get it wrong, we want to hear about it so that we can put things right and learn to do better in the future. If things do go wrong while working with you, we’ll own that and we promise to work with you to find an appropriate way to make it up to you. If you’re unhappy with our service or the way a member of our team has behaved, please tell us. See our complaints policy to find out how we handle complaints in a fair, consistent and timely fashion.
  2. In the very unlikely event that things go very wrong, we limit our liability to the fees you have paid us up to the point that you tell us in writing that we’ve done something wrong.
  3. So you know, we are insured with Beazley, with £1 million public and products liability and £1 million professional indemnity.

Accepting this agreement

By accepting a proposal and quote from us, you’re telling us that you’ve read these terms of service and you agree to all its terms and conditions. These terms are subject to the laws of England and Wales. Your statutory rights are not affected by agreeing to these terms and conditions.

We’ll clearly state any variation to these terms of service in a proposal or statement of work. Your approval of those documents tells us that you accept any stated variation to these terms.

These terms of service, and any variations stated in a proposal or statement of work, will form our agreement for the work.

We look forward to working together.

A group of people with diverse needs and backgrounds