Table of Contents
Contracts govern individual engagements; terms and conditions govern how you do business with everyone. They're the standing rules — payment norms, no-show policy, rescheduling, communication hours, liability basics — written once, referenced everywhere, so you stop re-litigating the same ten questions client by client. Most freelancers have these rules; almost none have written them down, which means they're enforced by awkward conversation instead of by document. Here's how to fix that in an evening.
T&Cs vs Contract: The Division of Labour
- The contract carries the deal-specific: this client, these dates, this scope, this price
- The T&Cs carry the invariant: how bookings confirm, how payments work, what happens on lateness (theirs and yours), your policies on trials, travel, revisions, and conduct
- The contract incorporates the T&Cs by reference — one line ("this agreement is subject to [Business]'s Terms of Service, attached/linked, version dated —") — so every engagement inherits the full rulebook without a 12-page signing burden
This split also means updating a policy is one edit to one document, not a renegotiation of every template.
The Ten Sections of Service-Business T&Cs
- Bookings & confirmation: what constitutes a confirmed booking (signature + advance), hold expiry, date-blocking rules
- Payments: advance percentages, balance timing, accepted methods, late-payment interest, GST treatment
- Cancellations & rescheduling: the sliding scale, reschedule allowance, force majeure — or a pointer to the fuller policy
- Punctuality & no-shows: notice windows, forfeitures, session end-times
- Scope & revisions: revision caps, change-order rule, add-on pricing basis
- Client obligations: timely inputs, venue access/power (trade-specific), a point of contact, accurate counts
- Deliverables & timelines: delivery windows, what delays extend them, storage duration for files/materials
- Usage & portfolio rights: your default portfolio grant with opt-out
- Liability & conduct: liability capped at fees, mutual-respect/working-hours norms, safety requirements
- Housekeeping: governing law and city, how T&Cs are updated (version + date), severability
Write them in your own plain voice — "Balances clear before delivery; galleries release on payment" beats legalese, binds identically, and doubles as brand ("so organized!"). One page to two pages, maximum.
How T&Cs Actually Bind
The enforceability checklist:
- Presented before commitment: linked/attached with the quote and contract — terms sprung after payment bind nothing
- Acknowledged: the contract's incorporation line plus signature covers it; for lighter engagements, "booking confirms acceptance of the terms (linked)" with the terms genuinely accessible
- Versioned: date-stamp each revision; the client is bound by the version they accepted, so keep the old ones (e-signed and stored, this is automatic)
- Consistent with the contract: where they conflict, the specific contract wins — say so in the T&Cs to prevent the argument
The Compounding Payoffs
- Speed: quotes go out with the rulebook attached instead of ten policy paragraphs rewritten each time
- Fair-application armour: "that's our standard policy, applied to everyone" is both true and unanswerable — the difficult-client repellent property of all written structure
- Team-readiness: the day an assistant answers inquiries, the T&Cs are their training manual
- The website bonus: published terms on your portfolio page pre-educate clients and signal establishment before the first call
Tonight's Assignment
Draft the ten sections from your existing answers — you already have these policies; you've been performing them verbally for years. Steal structure from the linked deep-dives, keep your voice, date it, link it from your quote template and contract templates, and attach it to your next booking. From tomorrow, every policy question you've ever answered twice has a permanent, citable, one-tap answer — which is precisely what "running a business" means, one page at a time.