Business: templates and forms

Ending a retainer or an ongoing service needs written notice within the period the contract sets — otherwise the contract renews and the charges carry on. The notice identifies the agreement, the termination date and the notice period, and settles the three things that are argued about afterwards: the final payment, the materials to be returned, and the accounts and access that have to be closed.

The other half of a contract for work. The record fixes what has been accepted, what has been noted as defective, what remains to be put right and how much is owed. Without it, an argument about whether the work was finished is conducted from memory. It is signed by both sides at the moment of acceptance, not afterwards.

The contract between a client and a contractor for a specific piece of work — a repair, a translation, a design, a course, anything given to a person rather than to a company. The weak point of most such contracts is vagueness: without a precise description of the work, a deadline and criteria for acceptance, there is no way to prove what was agreed. Here all three are separate fields rather than free text.

Signed before negotiations, before taking on a subcontractor, or before giving access to internal information. What matters is not the prohibition itself but the three things around it: what exactly counts as confidential, which exceptions are recognised, and how long the duty lasts after the relationship ends. An agreement without those three is hard to enforce.

For ongoing work with no clear end product: consultancy, maintenance, bookkeeping, training, a support retainer. It differs from a contract for work in that what is owed is an activity rather than a result — so what is agreed here is scope, frequency and response time, not the acceptance of a finished thing. Agree what is expressly outside the scope as well.