What Should Be in a Service Contract

Most service businesses do not get burned by a bad clause. They get burned by no clause at all — an email thread, a verbal yes, and a client who keeps adding "one small thing" and then argues about the invoice at the end.

Here is the short answer. A service contract needs six things to do its job: what is included, what is specifically excluded, what "done" means, the money terms, how changes get priced and approved, and what happens if someone cancels. Everything else is refinement. If you have those six written down and signed before you start, you have removed almost every argument you are likely to have.

The rest of this article is what goes in each one, the decisions you have to make yourself, and the four clauses you should not write without a lawyer.

The six clauses that do the work

That is under two hours of work for a document you will reuse on every job for years. The reason people do not do it is not difficulty. It is that writing the exclusion list forces you to admit what you have been giving away.

Start with the exclusion list, not the inclusion list

Everyone writes what is included. Almost nobody writes what is not. The excluded list is where the money is, because scope disputes are never about the main deliverable — they are about the adjacent thing the client assumed came with it.

Write two lists side by side.

Included. Plain nouns and verbs. Not "full service kitchen refresh" but "remove and dispose of existing cabinet doors, install 24 supplied doors and hinges, adjust for level."

Not included. This is the one that matters. Sit down and answer one question: what are the three things clients most often assume are free? Name those three specifically.

A few real patterns:

• A house cleaner: interior of the refrigerator, inside cabinets, exterior windows.
• A web designer: writing the copy, sourcing photos, hosting setup, email migration.
• A landscaper: hauling away debris that was already on site, irrigation repair, anything behind the fence line.
• A bookkeeper: cleaning up prior years, responding to IRS notices, filing the actual return.
• A mobile detailer: pet hair removal, mold or biohazard, engine bay.

Write them by name. "Additional services quoted separately" is not an exclusion list — it is a shrug. The client's memory of the sales conversation will always be more generous than yours, and a named exclusion is the only thing that reliably settles it.

One more line to add underneath: anything not listed above as included is not included. That is the catch-all, and it only works if you have named the obvious three above it, because a bare catch-all reads as hostile and a specific one reads as thorough.

Define "done" so a stranger could check it

"Complete to client satisfaction" is not a definition. It hands the client an unlimited veto, and every unhappy job you have ever heard about ended in that phrase.

Write done as a sentence someone outside the job could verify. Three parts:

1. The deliverable. What physically exists or has happened.
2. The date. When it exists by.
3. Who signs off. A named person or role, and what counts as sign-off.

For example: "Done means the five-page site is live on the client's domain, all forms tested, delivered by October 14. Client has five business days from the delivery email to request revisions. Silence past five business days counts as acceptance."

That last sentence is the one people forget, and it is the one that ends projects. Without a deemed-acceptance window, a project stays open forever because the client never got around to replying. Five to ten business days is a normal window.

Then set the revision limit. How many rounds of changes, or how many return visits, does the price cover? Two rounds is common for creative and consulting work. One callback within 30 days is common for trades. Pick a number, write it, and write what happens after: "Additional rounds are billed at $95/hour in 30-minute increments."

The number itself matters less than having one. Unlimited revisions is not generosity, it is an unpriced liability you have handed to the least decisive client you will ever have.

Put all the money in one block

Scatter payment terms across a document and clients read the part they like. Put them in a single block with a heading, and make it the block you point at.

It needs five things:

Two notes worth more than the table.

"Due on receipt" is not a date. Write a number of days from the invoice date. Net 15 collects faster than net 30 and clients rarely object to it if it is in the contract they signed. If you already have money stuck out there, the collection mechanics are a separate problem — chasing an invoice that is already late is a different skill from writing terms that stop it happening.

Late fees are state law, not preference. Maximum finance charges on overdue commercial and consumer accounts are capped at the state level, and the caps differ a lot. A 5% monthly charge that is fine in one state is unenforceable in another, and an unenforceable late fee clause can undercut you in front of a small claims judge. Before you write a number, check your state attorney general's office or your state's commercial code — or ask the attorney who reviews the document, since you are getting one anyway. A monthly finance charge of 1–1.5% is a widely used default precisely because it sits under most caps, but do not take that as the answer for your state.

If you are still setting your prices at all, that is upstream of this document — how you price the service determines whether a deposit even makes sense.

Write the change order rule, then decide what "in writing" means

This is the clause that would have prevented the whole problem. One sentence:

"Any work not listed in the included scope is a change order. Changes are priced in writing and approved in writing by the client before that work begins. Approved changes are added to the final invoice."

Then make the decision the template will not make for you: does a text message count as writing?

There is a real tradeoff.

• Text counts. Fast, and clients actually reply. But your approvals now live in a phone that could break, and screenshots are messier evidence than an email thread.
• Email only. Cleaner record, easier to produce later. But you will lose approvals to people who do not check email from a job site, and you will end up doing work while waiting.
• Both, with a rule. Text is fine for approval, and you send a confirming email the same day that quotes the price. This is what most small operators land on.

Whichever you pick, put it in the contract: "Written approval includes email and SMS." Then behave consistently. The first small free favor sets the actual rule, no matter what the document says. A client who gets the first $40 add-on free will read the change order clause as decorative — and they are not wrong to, because you taught them that.

Cancellation, reschedule, and what happens to the deposit

Two separate questions, and people collapse them into one.

The notice window. How much warning do you need to fill the slot? Trades that book by the day usually want 48 hours. Consulting engagements booked weeks out use 7 to 14 days. Pick from your actual rebooking reality, not from what feels polite.

The deposit. You have three options and you must pick one before you write the clause:

If you choose a non-refundable fee, name it as one and say what it buys: "The $300 scheduling fee reserves your date and is not refundable. It is applied to the final balance." A deposit labelled "deposit" and then kept looks like a penalty; a fee that clearly bought something looks like what it is. Some states and industries restrict non-refundable deposits, especially in consumer-facing work like home improvement — worth a specific check rather than an assumption.

Add the mirror clause too: what happens if you cancel. Usually a full refund of the deposit and no further liability. It costs you nothing and it is the clause that makes the whole cancellation section read as fair rather than one-sided.

Client responsibilities: the clause nobody writes and everybody needs

Most jobs that go wrong do not fail because of the work. They fail because something the client owed never arrived — the gate code, the logo files, the approval, the key, the product photos, someone home at 9am.

Write what you need, when you need it, and what happens if it does not show.

• Access. "Client provides access to the property between 8am and 4pm on the scheduled date."
• Materials or content. "Client provides final copy and images by October 3. Delivery date moves one business day for each business day of delay."
• Approvals. "Client responds to approval requests within three business days."
• The wasted trip. "If access is unavailable at the scheduled time, a trip charge of $85 applies and the job is rescheduled subject to availability."

That trip charge line is the whole clause for a mobile business. Without it you eat the drive, the fuel and the empty slot, and you feel bad asking for anything because nothing was agreed. With it, you send an invoice and it is uncontroversial.

For project work, the sliding delivery date is the equivalent. It stops the situation where the client sits on content for three weeks and then expects the original deadline.

The four things you should not write yourself

Everything above you can draft in an afternoon. These four you should not, and this is not caution for its own sake — these are the clauses where a wrong sentence transfers real financial risk to you and nothing in the document warns you it happened.

Also check whether your trade has mandatory contract disclosures. Licensed trades — contractors, home improvement, some health and beauty services — commonly must include specific items: the license number, a written right to cancel within a set number of days, a statement about liens, particular font sizes for particular notices. These are set by your state and sometimes your county. Missing one can make the contract unenforceable or expose you to a fine, and no generic template will contain them. Your state licensing board's website is the place to look, and it is usually a short document.

What this costs in practice: having an attorney review a document you have already drafted commonly runs a few hundred dollars, because you have done the expensive part. Having one write a service agreement from scratch runs considerably more. Draft first, then pay for the review — that ordering is the cheapest version of doing it properly. Prices vary by state and by firm, so get two quotes.

If you are at the earlier stage of setting up at all, whether you need an entity behind the contract is a related question — an LLC before your first customer is worth reading alongside this, because a contract signed by a person and a contract signed by an entity carry different risk.

Signing and storing it

A perfect contract that nobody signed is an email.

Pick one method and use it every time. E-signature tools handle this cheaply: Docusign, Dropbox Sign, and PandaDoc all have entry plans in roughly the $10–30 per month range for a single user, and many invoicing tools — Jobber, Housecall Pro, HoneyBook, Bonsai — include estimates or proposals with e-signature built into the plan you may already be paying for. Check what you have before buying anything new.

If you would rather not add a tool: a signed PDF returned by email works, and so does a clear written acceptance — "I accept the proposal dated August 29 as written" in a reply — for ordinary service work. Electronic signatures are generally valid in the US under the federal E-SIGN Act and state versions of UETA. Certain document types are excluded and a few trades have their own rules, so this is a question worth asking once for your specific business.

Then set the rule that makes it real: no work starts before the signature and the deposit both land. Not one of them. Both. This is the single operational habit that separates businesses that have contracts from businesses that have contract files. A signature with no deposit means the client has agreed to nothing they can feel. A deposit with no signature means you have taken money against undefined scope.

Store signed contracts in one folder, named by client and date, with a copy somewhere that is not your phone.

What the article gives you and what the guide gives you

Everything above tells you which clauses you need and what decisions each one forces. Writing the actual sentences is a separate job, and it is the one people stall on — they know they need a change order clause and they do not know how to phrase it so it reads firm without reading hostile.

That is what The Service Agreement Checklist is for. It is a $10 guide with the fill-in clause templates for all six core sections, the exact wording for exclusions, deemed acceptance, change orders and non-refundable scheduling fees, a decision tree for the choices this article asks you to make yourself — deposit type, notice window, what counts as writing — and the recovery scripts for when it goes wrong anyway: the message to send when a client asks for out-of-scope work mid-job, and how to raise a change order without souring the relationship.

Review it once a month, one clause at a time

The document does not get good on day one. It gets good by being run against reality.

Once a month, take the jobs you finished and hold each one against the agreement. Ask one question: did anything happen here that the contract did not cover, or covered badly?

Then find the single clause that failed and rewrite only that clause.

This is the part people get wrong. They have a bad month, decide the whole contract is broken, and start again from a new template — which resets them to a document that has learned nothing. The value in your agreement after two years is not the legal language. It is the eleven specific exclusions you added because eleven specific clients tried something.

Keep a running note: date, client, what happened, which clause was missing. Three lines. That note is what you hand the attorney at your next review, and it is worth more than an hour of their time spent guessing at your business. If you already write down how your work gets done, this fits alongside it — documenting the process and documenting the agreement are the same habit pointed at different problems.

What this looks like assembled

A working service agreement for a small business runs two to four pages. In order:

1. Parties and date
2. Scope — included
3. Scope — not included, with the three assumed-free items named
4. Definition of done, delivery date, sign-off, deemed acceptance window
5. Revisions or callbacks included, and the rate after that
6. Money block — total, deposit, balance trigger, methods, late terms
7. Change orders, and what counts as writing
8. Cancellation, reschedule, deposit treatment, both directions
9. Client responsibilities, delay consequences, trip charge
10. Attorney-drafted section — liability, indemnity, warranty, ownership
11. Any disclosures your trade or state requires
12. Signature blocks

Anything longer than four pages for a small service business is usually a copied template carrying clauses that do not apply to you. Clauses you do not understand are not protection. They are things you will not enforce, and a contract you will not enforce trains clients faster than no contract at all.

The short version

• Six clauses do the work: included scope, excluded scope, definition of done, the money block, change orders, cancellation. Write those and you have removed most disputes.
• The excluded list is worth more than the included list. Name the three things clients assume are free.
• "Done" needs a deliverable, a date, a named sign-off, and a deemed-acceptance window so projects can actually end.
• Check your own state before writing a late fee, a non-refundable deposit, or any trade-specific disclosure. These are set locally and templates get them wrong.
• Draft the operational clauses yourself, then pay an attorney a few hundred dollars to handle liability, indemnity, warranty and ownership. Draft first — it is the cheaper order.
• No work starts until the signature and the deposit both land. Then review one failed clause a month instead of rewriting the whole document.

The clause-by-clause wording, the decision tree and the scripts for the awkward mid-job conversation are in The Service Agreement Checklist.