Client Bill of Rights
Hi. If you are reading this, it means you are a valued client of Coalmarch Productions. This document is your Terms of Service & Bill of Rights as a client — it explains what you can expect from your relationship with us moving forward, in plain English.
We are here to provide you and your organization with great marketing, technical, and creative services, both on the web and off.
We want to be your favorite vendor — the best company you do business with. We won’t bill you for client service meetings, travel time, or telephone calls moving forward. We won’t nickel and dime you. We will bill you to create or make improvements upon amazing websites, mobile applications, print marketing pieces, and unique brands.
We think you’re going to love the results!
1. Communication
We use our web-based Project Management and invoicing system, CoalJobs, to communicate with you on your project. It is in your best interest to use CoalJobs to communicate with Coalmarch.
When you leave a comment in the CoalJobs system, an email goes out to everyone at Coalmarch, and it ensures that your request will be addressed by us. Email messages get lost, sent to a Spam folder, or skipped over in a large list of communication received each day. CoalJobs is here to prevent your needs from being mislaid. Log in here: http://support.coalmarch.com/
For example, even if you really like emailing or calling Jason directly, sometimes he goes off snowboarding for a week and is out of touch. We don’t want you to have a single point of failure in our communication chain with you. Your level of service is going to be even better if you use CoalJobs to communicate with us!
2. Billing
We use CoalJobs to track our time on projects and issue invoices as well. We accept business and personal checks, PayPal (to sales@coalmarch.com), and MasterCard and Visa via PayPal. Going forward, there is no surcharge for payments via credit card.
For support retainers, we invoice on the first of the month. For projects, we invoice on a 50/50 basis — that is, 50% is due before we start working, and the remaining 50% is due when we complete the project. If client sign-off delays exceed 30% of the total project timeline, we reserve the right to invoice you for some or all of the remaining balance. We can’t otherwise afford to keep our production schedule open indefinitely.
We invoice via email, on a net 30 basis. You will receive invoice-due reminders before the deadline. Past-due invoices are subject to late fees and/or interest. If you are past-due, we may suspend services until you pay your balance.
Once you have overdue invoices, you will receive an email reminder from CoalJobs and you will not have the ability to open new tickets through the system until your account is brought up to date. If that happens, just give us a call and we will help you sort it out.
If you request an audit from Coalmarch, the time to create additional custom reporting will be billable. The minimum fee for this research is $250 per request, invoiced at the time of the request.
3. Meetings & Phone Calls
Sitting down with you on a regular basis is extremely important to developing and maintaining successful creative and technical projects. We are happy to meet at your place, or, if you want to get out of the office, at our place in downtown Raleigh. We do not charge you for client service meetings or phone calls with our Client Service team.
If you need to meet or talk with a Programmer, Designer, or Marketer, and utilize their respective expertise then we consider that valuable consulting time and we do bill you for that time.
4. Travel Time
We do not charge you for local travel time or expenses related to your ongoing projects (within a 25-mile drive from our office in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina).
5. Sales Time
Coalmarch never charges you for sales-related time. For instance, we don’t bill a client or prospective client for holding meetings about our capabilities or for creating an estimate for you.
6. Client Service Time Is Not Billable
Coalmarch does not charge for client service time. When you call your account manager with questions, or when you call, write, or meet about your current projects, you aren’t paying for that time.
If a member of our technical, design, or marketing team participates in a meeting with you, we will bill for their time but not your account manager’s time.
If you ever have a question about this, we’re glad to help. Give us a call — it won’t cost you any billable time to ask!
7. Technical, Design, and Marketing Time Is Billable
We provide technical, design, marketing, and other professional services to help your organization. We track our time when we work on your account. That time is billable.
As we describe above, client service time is not billable. But if your account manager provides marketing, analytical, or other professional services on behalf of Coalmarch, that time is billable.
Occasionally there is confusion about billing when a client calls to request something and then is surprised to receive an invoice. To be clear, if you ask for us to accomplish something for you, we’ll do it and our work is billable. This includes urgent requests, which will be billed at a higher Rush Rate, as described in the “Turnaround Time & Rush Rates” item.
8. Estimates
We’re glad to provide free estimates for any future projects you’re considering. An estimate is a high-level analysis of how much time it would take for us to plan, design, develop, and test your project, and they usually take a couple hours for us to put together.
Because they do not involve in-depth analysis, estimates are non-binding. If you decide to move forward, the final cost may be different from the estimate. Estimates are free.
9. Quotes
For many projects with a standard timeline and deliverables (e.g., an entry-level website, or a standard Logo Design package), we can provide an accurate price without requiring further analysis.
If you’d like a binding quote (either a dollar value or a support-hours value) for a custom project, we are happy to make one for you. This requires staff time to assess the scope, evaluate requirements, analyze the specific situation, and recommend next steps.
This work — toward making your business or organization more money or improving your operations — requires our technical, marketing, and/or design expertise toward solving specific problems for you and is billable. The cost depends on the scope of the project. We can give you an estimate beforehand on how much time it will take to create the quote.
A Quote from Coalmarch Productions is good for 30 days. You pay for Quotes.
10. Contracts
If you like what you see in your Estimate or Proposal document and would like to move forward with us, then we create a Contract for you. This document is an agreement that states that we are going to provide the services described in the Statement of Work document to you in exchange for a dollar value compensation from you.
11. Statement of Work
This document is the blueprint for your project. It is very important that you fully understand the Statement of Work (SoW) before we move forward on developing your project. We are happy to sit down with you and explain it line by line.
You must approve the Statement of Work as a condition of signing your Contract. Adding functionality beyond the SoW may trigger a scope change, including a line-item to implement the additional features (see the item labeled “Scope Creep”).
12. Standard Hourly Rate
Our Standard Hourly Rate is $125 per hour. We bill for professional services rendered, including Design, Programming, and Marketing. We offer a reduced hourly rate to retainer Clients. See the section below on “Retainers” for more information.
This rate will apply to all Clients for work as of June 6, 2011. If you are currently paying more or less and would like to discuss this change, please Contact Karl Sakas, Director of Client Services, at 919-439-2216 or ksakas at coalmarch.com.
We quote some projects on a fixed-cost basis, which means we’ll deliver everything within the scope of the project at no additional cost to you. Of course, if you wish to expand the scope, that additional work would be billable separately.
13. Turnaround Time & Rush Rates
Our Rush Rate is $225 per hour.
If you are not a retainer client, we still appreciate you, however we have to focus on our retainer Clients and ongoing projects. Our production schedule is booked 2-4 weeks in advance. This means that if you’re not a retainer client but you need something done in less than two weeks, we will need to bump another project out of the way to make room for your rush project. We charge our Rush Rate to do this.
Additionally, our regular business hours are 9am–6pm, EST, Monday through Thursday, and 9am-1pm on Fridays. If you require professional services outside of these hours or on holidays, the work will be quoted at our Rush Rate.
14. Sign-off and Approval Delays
There are periodic milestones during the lifetime of any project. These include signing off on wireframe designs, home page designs, interior page designs, etc. You can provide signoffs right in the CoalJobs project tickets. Delays on getting your feedback on these types of approvals will result in a delay in the completion of your project.
Occasionally, Clients require substantially longer than expected to provide signoffs (e.g., a month instead of 2-3 business days). We build our production schedule to include time set aside for your project, which means not taking on certain projects for other Clients in that time. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to keep our schedule open for you indefinitely. As we note in the item labeled “Billing,” this may result in our invoicing you for some or all of the remaining balance prior to project completion.
15. Scope Creep
Scope Creep is any deviation from the development plan defined in the Statement of Work. Scope creep is pretty normal — it is natural for both parties to begin to consider how users may interact with a website in ways they hadn’t when the project started, and want to make changes accordingly. This is why we really put a lot of time into the planning phase of the project.
You have a choice, after we quote out the changes as line items that will be billed separately from your main project you get to decide on whether that works for you. If you don’t proceed with it at the time of original development we can always revisit the feature request at a later date.
For those changes that are not included in the scope of a Statement of Work, we’ll charge a standard rate of $125/hour with your approval on any line-item work. Line items are invoiced at the time of approval.
16. After Launching Your Site
We love creating websites and marketing materials for you. But neither will function indefinitely without hiccups.
Websites are like cars. You wouldn’t drive a car for ten years and never change the oil or rotate the tires. The same applies to our websites — they need maintenance, and sometimes things go wrong. Fixing problems can be complicated.
In order for the site to continue operating smoothly, you may need to make necessary changes or updates. We can address problems that you’re having and make updates when you need them, but there are costs involved for maintenance. We bill for that time.
Due to the complicated and evolving nature of interactive marketing, our websites and custom Programming work do not have a lifetime warranty. What works when you launched your site may not work two years later. For instance, Facebook keeps changing its API, which means your site will need updates to stay current. And PayPal recently updated its Payflow Pro service, which required custom updates to keep Clients’ E-Commerce sites working. We are glad to handle these updates on a “spot” (project) or retainer basis.
The post-launch grace period is your opportunity to create a “punch list” of things for us to address. If you request additional changes any time after the post-launch grace period, we will give you an estimate or quote to perform the necessary work, which you must approve (and thus agree to pay) before we complete the work.
17. Retainers
We offer Retainers to provide ongoing support, maintenance, creative, and marketing services. We offer a range of retainer packages to fit your needs, ranging from 10 to 40 hours a month, at a discount from our regular $125/hour rate.
You get several benefits when you sign a support retainer with Coalmarch. Specifically, you receive dedicated time on our production schedule, you get better turnaround time than non-support Clients, you enjoy a reduced hourly rate, you can better budget your monthly marketing expenses, and we can proactively identify ways to improve or maintain your website or marketing program.
Support Retainer Clients enjoy 24 hour response time for new support requests, and priority scheduling for retainer work on our production schedule, compared to 3-4 days’ initial response time for non-retainer Clients.
Retainer Clients have access to all of Coalmarch’s services – Programming, Graphic Design, marketing, SEO, and more – and you know exactly how much you’ll spend each month. You get monthly reports showing how you used your hours.
Your retainer fee does not include tangible Products. For example, if we broker the printing of a brochure or business cards for you, you will receive a line-item invoice for the cost of goods. Monthly overage is billed at our standard hourly rate and may not have the same immediate turnaround as your contracted hours, depending on our production schedule at the time.
Based on your past and future marketing needs, we can recommend an appropriately sized retainer. If you need more than 40 hours/month of assistance, we can create a custom retainer package for you.
Answering Your Questions
If you’re a current or prospective client and you have questions about the Bill of Rights, feel free to give us a call. Contact your account manager directly, or dial (919) 481-2895 and Press 2 for client service. Thanks for your business!
Latest version of this document: Tuesday, May 3, 2011
