Payment Terms (Internal)¶
Moved from touchstone §11, which keeps the offering positioning and no longer carries the payment schedule. This is the default stage split for a one-off website project; the prices it is applied to come from website-pricing.md and the bands in engagement-bands.md.
The default for a one-off website project, and what a proposal quotes unless there is a reason not to:
| Stage | Trigger | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Commencement | The contract is formed (the Commencement Date); Discovery starts | 30% |
| Design sign-off | Experience design and the visual system signed off (chapter 3) | 20% |
| Build complete | Alpha: the full functional scope working, internally QA'd (chapter 4) | 40% |
| Launch | Go-live and handover (chapter 6) | 10% |
Three conventions sit behind the split:
- The triggers are gates, not dates. Each stage invoices when its gate is met, so a slipped project never puts an invoice ahead of the work it bills for. They are gates the client already sees in the process (process/), not billing milestones invented for the schedule.
- Invoices go out on round figures. Every stage but the last rounds up to the nearest £25 and the last carries the balance, so the four sum to the project total exactly. The final invoice is the one raised when the total is already settled, so it is the one that absorbs the adjustment.
- The weighting follows the work. Build carries the largest share because it is the largest block of delivery. The commencement share covers the Discovery that starts immediately and is integral to every project.
All + VAT, payable 14 days from the date of invoice (T&Cs 5.3). The schedule is a commercial term rather than a price, so it is stated per proposal and recorded in the Scope of Work (T&Cs 5.2): this is the default, and a deviation from it is a commercial decision made deliberately, the way a discount is. The stage figures are computed from the project total in the cost builder (tools/microsite/).
Two engagements do not use this schedule. A Momentum Partnership is invoiced monthly in advance on every term (momentum/ is canonical). An engagement with no build, a standalone Discovery being the common case, takes its own milestone split, stated in its proposal.