Service agreement template
Service agreements are critical to keeping businesses running smoothly. Use this free service agreement template to get started.
Service agreements are critical to keeping businesses running smoothly. Use this free service agreement template to get started.
Service agreements are one of the fundamental contracts businesses need to keep operations running smoothly and manage relationships with customers. They define the terms of services provided or received, ensuring that both parties understand their obligations and protect their interests.
In this article, we'll explore what service agreements are, why they're important, and how you can automate them to make your business more efficient.
A Service Agreement, sometimes known as a General Service Contract, Service Level Agreement, or Consulting Services Agreement, is a document that outlines the terms of a service provided by one party (the service provider) to another (the client).
These agreements are used to define the scope of work, duration, compensation, and other terms and conditions. They are often used in industries such as IT, consulting, marketing, and many more.
Because service agreements are essential for businesses, you can quickly have a large volume of them needing to be processed. Creating and reviewing them at scale can quickly become difficult for legal teams at fast-growth businesses, unless they have a watertight service agreement template and a robust process for managing contracts.
The most common use cases for a service agreement template include:
When you hire a service provider, such as a consultant, IT professional, or marketing agency, they'll need to understand the scope of their work, the timeline, and how they will be compensated. A service agreement provides a clear and legally binding document that outlines these details.
If you're a service provider, you'll want to ensure that you have a clear agreement with your clients about the services you'll provide, the timeline, and your compensation. This protects you from potential disputes and ensures you get paid for your work.
For ongoing or long-term services, a service agreement can provide a framework that can be updated or amended as needed. This allows for flexibility while still maintaining a clear understanding of the terms of the service.
Service agreements often include service level agreements (SLAs), which define the level of service expected from the service provider. This can include things like response times, uptime for software products, quality of work, and other performance metrics.
Different teams and individuals will need to send out service agreements, depending on the use case and the needs of the business.
These teams will often include sales, legal, HR, finance, operations, and procurement. If you provide or receive services that need to be defined and agreed upon, you are already a potential user.
However, if the company is big enough to have an in-house legal team, it's likely that legal is tasked with owning and creating service agreement templates. They will usually have approval rights over the final version too.
Finding a way to create and process service agreements at scale is important for any fast growth business.
Whether you’re experiencing difficulty deciding what your service agreement should include or you’re simply unsure where to start, agreeing on service contracts can quickly become a bottleneck that holds your team back. Below we'll look at the key elements of a service agreement template, and the processes to adopt that make it easier to agree these contracts
Your service agreement template needs to be comprehensive enough to cover a broad range of situations, offering your business the protections it needs and ensuring an appropriate value exchange with the customer. Not sure what to include? It's advisable to consult a lawyer to draft such an important document, but a service agreement template will often include the following provisions:
Your service agreement should clearly outline the parties involved in the contract. They should be referred to by name, with any legal names of businesses clearly listed.
Set out a clear scope of what services will be provided under the terms of the agreement.
This includes a detailed description of the tasks, responsibilities, and deliverables that the service provider is expected to complete.
The more thorough this description is, the better. This is because it enables service providers to manage their client's expectations more accurately.
The agreement should clearly define the compensation for the services provided.
This can include the amount, payment schedule, and any conditions related to the payment (such as late fees or penalties for early termination).
As with all contracts, service agreements should clearly define the contract's duration. This can either be a clear and measurable duration.
Service agreements often include a confidentiality clause to protect sensitive information that may be shared during the course of the service.
This clause should define what information is considered confidential and the obligations of the parties to protect this information.
It's common for a confidentiality agreement or an NDA to be shared separately with the counterparty to supplement this.
The agreement should also outline the conditions under which the agreement can be terminated. This can include breach of contract, failure to meet performance standards, or other specific conditions.
The service agreement should also include a clause that outlines how disputes will be resolved. Usually, this section will describe some ways to resolve the dispute before taking it to court, such as negotiation, mediation, arbitration, or litigation.
The agreement should specify which jurisdiction's laws will govern the agreement. This is especially important if the parties are located in different jurisdictions.
Even with an exhaustive list of what to include in your service agreements, the contract management process can quickly become painful. Here's what it looks like for businesses that adopt a manual approach:
But the process isn't seamless. It's admin-heavy and it involves a lot of back and forth, quickly becoming a burden for teams that are already buried in low-value admin work.
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As you have just heard, building service agreements from the ground up is hard work. In particular, businesses encounter the following problems:
Luckily, your process doesn't have to look like the one we just described. There's a faster and more efficient way to create service agreements. You can automate them in Juro.
By managing your service agreements in a flexible and collaborative contract management solution like Juro, you can save time and streamline the process. You can get started by grabbing the free service agreement template PDF above, or read below to find out more about contract automation.
In most businesses, legal counsel will want to determine which clauses are used in a service agreement template, and when they are used.
With Juro's automated contract templates, in-house lawyers can comfortably define and control the terms of the service agreement.
These pre-approved templates can then be used by commercial teams to self-serve on contracts from the template without inviting contractual risk.
Sales reps simply use the Q&A flow on a service agreement template to enter key data in smart fields and watch the data auto-populate the contract to customize it.
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Juro users can also collaborate on their service agreements in real time, with the ability to toggle seamlessly between internal and external commenting.
This means that contract owners can discuss the contract terms privately with their internal stakeholders and respond to counterparties' comments, suggestions and contract redlines without leaving the platform.
Once the service agreement is approved, it can be sent for signature. With our native eSignature solution, parties can sign the service agreement in seconds, from any device.
Removing the usual friction from the signing process helps you to secure new clients faster and more efficiently.
The contract lifecycle doesn't end once a service agreement is signed. There are a few, important things you need to do to manage and track your contracts post-signature, too.
Juro makes all of this work easy by centralizing your contract storage and making all of your contracts fully searchable. With Juro's data-rich contract repository, it's easy to find, query and report on your service agreements.
You can even set automated contract reminders for your agreements, allowing you to track auto-renewal deadlines, termination dates, and upcoming contractual obligations.
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Admin-heavy paperwork is rarely a good use of time for a fast-growing business, and service agreements can quickly become a headache. By automating your service agreements with a contract automation platform like Juro, you can streamline your contract process, save time, and reduce risk. To find out more about Juro's features and benefits, hit the button below.
Juro is the #1-rated contract platform globally for speed of implementation.
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