Understand the risks before you agree with a customer.
When you provide a service or deliverable, the customer contract determines more than what you promise. ContractIQ helps providers and sellers inspect whether payment is assured, scope can expand without control, acceptance can be delayed, and commitments, liability and intellectual property match the deal.
Evidence-backed review prompts. A human decides what to accept, clarify or escalate.
Protect delivery, scope and payment assumptions
A seller-side review starts with the customer’s commitments: timely inputs, access, decisions, testing and payment. Check whether those duties have dates, objective evidence and a consequence when they are late, rather than leaving delivery risk with the provider.
Read scope and change language beside the statement of work, assumptions and pricing. A broad obligation to accommodate requests can create scope creep even when the original deliverable is clearly described.
- Payment assurance: due dates, invoice disputes, withholding rights, credit risk and suspension triggers.
- Scope control: change requests, out-of-scope work, dependencies and price or timeline adjustment.
- Acceptance timing: objective tests, deemed acceptance, feedback windows and re-performance limits.
Make seller commitments and exposure proportionate
Providers should compare service commitments with the liability cap, exclusions, warranties, indemnities and customer remedies. A promise to meet an outcome can carry a different exposure from a promise to use reasonable skill and care, especially when acceptance or customer dependency is unclear.
Check who owns pre-existing materials, customer data, new work product and permitted reuse. ContractIQ points to the wording and its practical questions; the seller, customer and qualified advisers decide what position is acceptable.
- Commitments and liability: does the promised outcome match the cap, exclusions and remedy structure?
- Intellectual property: identify background materials, deliverables, licences, restrictions and customer inputs.
- Customer commitments: confirm that dependencies, approvals and acceptance duties support the delivery promise.
Example: acceptance delay shifts delivery risk
“Customer may reject a Deliverable for any reason until it is satisfied that the Deliverable meets its requirements.”
For a provider, the question is how acceptance is tested, when feedback is due, whether rejection must identify a material defect and when payment becomes due. Read the sentence with the specification, milestone plan and change process before deciding whether the delivery and payment model is workable.
A customer needs a fair way to identify defects, while a seller needs a bounded process and a reliable payment trigger. The parties must decide those trade-offs from the service context and complete agreement.
A focused next step
- List customer inputs, approval dates and acceptance tests beside each delivery milestone.
- Compare payment triggers with scope change, suspension, rejection and dispute rights.
- Have commercial, delivery and legal owners validate commitments, liability and IP treatment.