Payment Terms

Three kinds of charge, invoiced three ways:

• Hourly work — logged as it happens and invoiced monthly in arrears, at the standard rate stated on the rate card. No monthly minimum and no prepayment.
• Project and assessment work — billed hourly against the estimated-hours range in the scope document, invoiced on the milestones stated there, or on completion where none are stated. An assessment is invoiced when the report is delivered.
• Pass-through purchases — hardware, software subscriptions, and third-party services are invoiced when they are ordered, because that is when we are billed for them. See section 06.

Every invoice itemises the work: what was done, the quantity, the unit price, and the tax treatment of that line. Labour is always stated separately from hardware and software, which matters for tax as well as for reading the bill (section 05).

Invoices and their payment status are available in your client hub alongside the quote or statement of work they came from.

Standard terms are net 14 — payment due within 14 days of the invoice date. Your Master Services Agreement or statement of work may set different terms, and where it does, it wins.

Longer net terms are negotiable, before the engagement starts, in writing. A purchase-order requirement is workable, but tell us at quoting time, not at invoicing time — an invoice that has to be reissued against a PO number is a fortnight lost for both of us.

• ACH or bank transfer — preferred, and the default for ongoing hourly work and anything with hardware on it. Remittance details are on the invoice. Payment is applied when the funds land.
• Card — through the secure payment link on your invoice, processed by Stripe. Convenient for smaller amounts and for getting a first engagement moving. We never see or store your card number.
• Check — payable to The Holm Team, mailed to the address on the invoice. Applied when it clears.

No processing surcharge is added: the invoice total is the total, whichever method you use. Payment in a currency other than US dollars is not accepted.

A deposit is required only where a statement of work says so — typically where we are ordering hardware or paying a third party up front. When one is required, the amount is on the quote before you approve it, and it is applied in full against the final invoice. It is money on account, not a fee.

A balance outstanding after its due date is past due. What follows is deliberately unsurprising:

• You hear from a person first. An email, then a phone call — not a collections notice from a system.
• A past-due balance may carry a late charge or interest at the rate stated on the face of the invoice or in your Master Services Agreement. Where neither states one, none is charged.
• After written notice, we may suspend non-urgent work until the account is settled — project work, scheduled changes, new requests.
• Monitoring, backup, and an active incident are not suspended. Turning off the alarms over an unpaid invoice would be an indefensible thing to do, and we do not do it.
• Repeated non-payment is grounds for termination under the Terms, with the offboarding commitments in those Terms unchanged and unconditional.

Termination and offboarding are covered in section 12 of the Terms of Service. An unpaid balance never changes them: your data, credentials and tenant ownership are returned regardless.

Fees are exclusive of tax. You are responsible for applicable California sales and use tax, and each invoice line carries its own tax category — service, hardware, prewritten software, or non-taxable — rather than one rate smeared across the document.

Today. Separately stated service labour is generally not subject to California sales tax. Hardware we sell you is. That is precisely why labour and hardware are never combined into one line: California can treat a lumped line as a taxable sale of goods in its entirety, so keeping them apart is in your interest, not just ours.

From 2027-01-01. California Senate Bill 122, signed 2026-06-29, extends sales and use tax to prewritten software regardless of delivery method — expressly including remotely accessed software and SaaS — for transactions on or after 2027-01-01. In practice, software subscriptions we resell to you are likely to become taxable on that date. Custom software stays exempt, and genuinely managed services — monitoring, administration, helpdesk, consulting — are not prewritten software and stay untaxed.

This is the reason our invoices price the labour as hourly service and pass software through as a separately stated line rather than bundling everything into one number. When the change lands, tax appears on the software line and nowhere else, and your invoice does not need renegotiating.

This section describes how we bill. It is not tax advice, and your own tax position is between you and your accountant.

Hardware, software subscriptions and third-party services are quoted before they are ordered and invoiced at cost plus a stated procurement margin, or at a stated procurement fee. Either way the number is on the quote before you approve it; there is no undisclosed markup.

Where it suits the engagement we will instead have the vendor or distributor invoice you directly and simply manage the order. For anything substantial that is usually the better arrangement: you get the vendor’s own pricing, warranty and support relationship, and the equipment is yours from the moment it ships.

• Third-party products carry the vendor's warranty, not ours, and those terms bind you directly. We pass through what the vendor allows to be passed through and nothing more — see section 09 of the Terms.
• Subscription licences renew on the vendor's cycle. Cancellation windows are the vendor's, and we will tell you what they are before you commit.
• Pass-through purchases are invoiced when ordered and are not refundable once the vendor has billed us, except where the vendor itself allows a return.
• Shipping, and any recycling or disposal fee California charges on covered electronic devices, is stated on the line it belongs to.

If a charge looks wrong, tell us before it becomes a dispute. Write to team@holm.team with the invoice number and what does not look right. Nearly every billing question at this scale is settled with one email and, where owed, a corrected invoice or a credit.

Disputing part of an invoice does not hold up the rest: pay the undisputed portion on its normal terms, and the disputed line pauses until it is resolved. We will not treat an invoice as past due over a line you raised in good faith and in time.

You keep every right you have to dispute a card charge with your issuer. Chargebacks run through the issuer and Stripe’s dispute process. We only ask for the conversation first, because it is faster for you and it is how we would want to be treated.

• Overpayments and billing errors — refunded or credited to your account, your choice, promptly and without being asked.
• Deposits — refunded in full where the work does not proceed for a reason other than your cancellation after we have committed spend on your behalf.
• Hourly work — nothing is prepaid, so there is nothing to refund on termination. A final invoice covers only hours already logged.
• Deficient work — the remedy under the warranty in section 09 of the Terms is re-performance at no charge, not a refund. Tell us in writing within thirty days of the work and we put it right.
• Pass-through purchases — refundable only to the extent the vendor refunds us.

Card refunds go back through Stripe to the original payment method and usually appear in 5–10 business days depending on your bank. ACH and check refunds are returned by the same method, normally within a few business days of the refund being agreed.

A receipt is emailed when a payment is recorded, whatever the method — card payments the moment Stripe confirms them, bank transfers and checks as soon as they are logged. Every quote, statement of work, invoice, payment and receipt stays available in your client hub, and a copy of any of them is yours on request.

The Holm Team is a sole proprietorship, so the payee on every invoice is the business owner rather than a company — worth knowing before you set us up as a vendor, because the W-9 you receive is a sole-proprietor one and your accounts payable process may treat it differently.

Billing records are retained for seven years for tax and record-keeping purposes. How long everything else is kept is set out in the privacy policy.