How this engagement works, before you're in it.
Most of what governs a professional engagement lives in a contract you see after you've decided. The commercial terms below are published in advance because several of them are the reason to hire us, and one of them is a reason not to.
The fee is fixed
You pay one price for the exam, agreed before it begins. The invoice is identical whichever way the verdict goes — keep, cut, shift, or do nothing.
It is not a percentage of savings we identify. That structure pays the auditor to find waste, and an auditor paid to find waste will find it.
It is not contingent on any outcome, threshold, or finding.
It does not vary with the size of your spend, the size of your company, or what the exam turns up.
Nothing credits
The exam fee does not reduce the price of any later engagement, and no part of it is refundable against future work.
A credit converts an audit into a sales funnel. Everyone downstream can tell — including the people you show the report to.
Remediation is a separate decision, made after your verdict is signed
We do not agree in advance to perform any work the exam recommends.
After your verdict is signed and delivered, we review what it found and elect whether to take remediation on or refer it out. We may decline.
That election happens after a permanent signature exists. No finding can be shaped toward work that wasn't on the table when it was signed, because at the moment of signing there was no such work.
If we do take it on, here is exactly what changes: performance reporting on a system we built is delivery accountability, not independent verification, and we will never sell it to you as the latter. The independence claim attaches to the exam that set your baseline. It does not extend to anything we build afterward.
The 3× test
Before you commit, we establish the decision your exam would inform and what turns on it.
If that decision isn't worth at least three times the fee, we tell you not to buy it. On the scoping call, out loud, before an invoice exists.
An audit that costs more than the decision it informs is a purchase we would rather not make on your behalf.
Cancellation
Cancel before your pre-registration is countersigned and nothing is owed.
Once the pre-registration is countersigned, the method is sealed and the exam is committed. From that point the fee is due in full whether or not the exam completes, because the value of a sealed method is that it cannot be unsealed once the evidence starts arriving — including by us, and including at your request.
If we cannot complete the exam for reasons on our side, you owe nothing and any amount paid is returned.
What independence obligates
We do not accept payment, commission, referral fee, rebate, or consideration of any kind from any vendor, platform, agency, or tool that appears in your exam or its recommendations.
We do not resell, white-label, or hold a commercial interest in any product the exam might recommend you buy.
Our own analytics run on hardware we own. We are not a customer of the surfaces we measure in any way that would be affected by what we report about them.
What we will not do
We will not amend a signed verdict. It is written to a permanent, append-only record and it cannot be altered, softened under pressure, or presented differently to different audiences. What was signed is what was found.
We will not produce a second, more favourable version for internal circulation.
We will not withhold an unfavourable finding at a client's request. Directing us not to look somewhere in the first place is your right, and it is recorded in the pre-registration where anyone reading the report can see it.
The governing agreement
These are our standing terms. Any exam is performed under a separately executed engagement agreement, and where these terms and a signed agreement differ, the signed agreement controls.
Nothing on this page is an offer that can be accepted by reading it.