Setting Out the Terms and Conditions for Your Small Business
By: Vanessa Anderson Posted on Tue, 22-03-2016
Establishing a new business is not easy at all. Even if you are planning to start on a small scale, careful planning and special attention to detail are needed for a strong foundation and long term success.Â
Several factors should be considered before starting a new business. For instance, you should do some research on the competitors first and choose your target market wisely. Secondly, you should make a list of some favorable small business credit cards so that you can choose the most suitable one when needed.
Along with these, another critical step is to plan out and set terms and conditions for your business. It won’t be wrong to say that the success and stability of your business greatly depend on how and what conditions you set up for your business.
The Significance of Terms and Conditions
The terms and conditions are like the backbone of your business on which the stability and smooth functioning of the whole organization depends. The better terms you set up, the easier it would be to develop a stable mechanism which will be helpful in the long run.
Besides, the document of terms and conditions is essential no matter to which industry your business belongs. Moreover, it defines your business procedures, protects your company and explains your liabilities and limits.
Things to Remember
Considering the significance of terms and conditions, it is vital to prepare the document with great care. Before finalizing it, you must go through it twice and make adjustments where needed. Besides, you must consider the following two factors while defining your critical agreement of terms and conditions.
Identify your Reasons
The agreement of terms and conditions can help your company to be on the safe side as it does not allow the users to abuse your products or services. Besides, it also helps to limit liabilities and validates your ownership in the intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks.
So first, you should clearly understand all these reasons which you should cover in the terms agreement. Otherwise, you will end up limiting your authority of legal enforcement and claim against customers.
Define your Ground Rules
In addition to understanding your reasons for writing down business terms, another critical aspect to remember is your core values and basic rules.
It is important to include those in your terms and conditions so that nothing can go against your rules. It will help you to manage the business when all policies are made in line with your fundamental rules.
Practical Tips for Effective formulation of Terms and Conditions
- We have come up with some valuable tips for crafting terms and conditions for your business.
- Always include a clear detail of what services or products you will offer. Keep the explanation precise and simple.
- State the payment terms clearly.
- Mention the offered warranties and guarantees and include detail of how these will be handled.
- Be specific in providing details on your liability limit.
- State the circumstances in which there can be changes in the charges of different products and services. Also, mention the details of how and when will the clients be informed.
- Add proper timelines for delivering products or services.
- Map out a list of critical commercial terms that you intend to offer to the clients.
- Consider all the worst case scenarios and think about what can go wrong. Then map out solutions for each case.
- Review your terms and conditions with an eye for detail from a customer’s perspective and ensure that the language is easily understandable by them.
Once you set out all your conditions for business, the next important step is to ensure that these are enforced. For this purpose, mere printing of the document on the back of the invoice is not sufficient. You need to go to an extra mile and make sure that the client is agreed upon all terms before he/she signs on any agreement.
How to Enforce your business Terms and Conditions?
You should highlight all your terms and conditions whenever your contract is agreed by the customer. For instance, whenever new customers come and you open up an account for them, you must make sure that you forward the copy of terms and conditions.
So that the customers clearly know what the exact terms of your business are. You should also ask them to send back its signed copy as proof that they are fully aware of the rules and terms.
The Last Words
The initial phase of business development is always difficult. Setting up your terms and conditions can be very helpful in adding convenience for both the companies and customers. If you are also planning to start your new setup soon, the abovementioned tips can be very fruitful for you.
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