Our industry has been thrust into acquiring a fast education on things to look out for when signing a software contact. I am sure it is a topic many never thought they would have to address. In business, contracts are a necessary evil. Reverting to them and getting into heated debates over them is usually unnecessary because the contract is put into place to benefit BOTH parties — not only the vendor. Quality providers won’t have to fall back on the fine print of a contract, that you probably never knew was there in the first place. Quality providers are up front with the terms of the agreement. 

Data for almost every business is the lifeblood of a company. This holds especially true for our industry because of all the compliance regulations we have to consider. Data, your data, is critical to have just to continue to legally operate. You should not have to pay to get an export of your data when leaving a software vendor. We have discussed best practices for reviewing contracts before but as the industry goes through transition, this topic is still a heated one and it is spilling into the social world as well.

We always recommend making the investment in legal advice when reviewing any contract but the article below does provide some useful and very easy to read advice.

Things To Watch Out For

1. Early termination fees

2. Hidden fees

3. Evergreen clause

4. Data migration

5. Data retention

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