How many sets of terms and conditions is your business actually using?

Ask a business owner how many sets of terms and conditions the company uses and the answer is almost always "one". Ask the person who sends quotes and the answer is usually "it depends what they ask for". Both answers are given honestly. Only one of them is a count.

The real number is discoverable, it takes about an afternoon, and it is worth knowing before you spend money fixing anything, because the fix is different depending on whether the answer is two or eleven.

Why the shared drive gives the wrong number

The instinct is to open the folder where terms are kept and count the files. This undercounts, badly, for a structural reason: the shared drive holds what people saved deliberately, and terms get attached to emails far more often than they get saved.

The versions that matter are the ones that went out. A document sitting in a folder that nobody has attached to anything in two years is not in circulation. A document living only in one person's downloads folder, attached to sixty quotes, is.

The sent-mail method

Search sent mail across the accounts of everyone who has ever sent a quote, a proposal or an order confirmation. Search by attachment name fragments rather than by folder: terms, conditions, T&C, supply, and whatever your business calls them internally. Include the accounts of people who have left, if you still have them.

Then collect every distinct attachment. Not every email: every distinct file. Deduplicate by opening them, not by file name, because the same file gets renamed constantly and different files get named identically.

For each one, record four things:

• the file name as sent
• the date range over which it was sent
• who sent it
• whether it differs from the others in any way you can see

That last column is deliberately vague. You are not assessing what the differences do. You are noticing that they exist.

What the count usually is

In a business of ten to fifty people that has been operating for more than three years and has never done this exercise, the count is typically between three and seven.

The distribution is predictable. There is usually one document that most people use. There is a second that diverged when the business started doing a slightly different kind of work: a different delivery model, a different payment arrangement, a bigger customer who wanted something changed. There is often a third that exists because somebody was on leave and the person covering rebuilt it from a proposal. And there are one or two that are nearly identical to the main one but carry a change nobody can account for.

The nearly-identical ones are the interesting category, because they are the ones that will still be in circulation in two years if nothing is done. Obviously-different documents get noticed and questioned. Documents that differ by one paragraph do not.

What the number tells you

Two or three. This is a consolidation job, not a systems job. Pick the version that should govern, retire the others by moving them somewhere clearly marked as superseded, and put a version number in the footer of the survivor. A day of work.

Four to seven. The count itself is not the problem: the absence of a controlled way to make a change is. Consolidating without fixing that produces the same spread again within two years. This is where a variation register and a defined approval path start earning their cost.

More than seven. Usually this means the business is genuinely selling in several different ways and has never acknowledged it. The answer is often not one set of terms but a deliberate two or three, each matched to a channel, rather than an accidental nine.

What to do with the differences

Once you have the set, mark up the differences between them. Take the version most commonly sent as the baseline and mark what every other version does differently. This produces a single sheet of specific, located differences.

That sheet is the thing to take to your own external adviser. It converts an open-ended question (are our terms any good) into a closed one, which is what makes it cheap to answer. The alternative is handing over a folder and paying for somebody to do the counting exercise you could have done yourself.

Do it before you change anything

The temptation after finding six versions is to immediately write a seventh, better one and declare it current. That produces seven documents in circulation, because the previous six do not stop being attached to quotes just because a new one exists.

The order that works is: count, mark the differences, decide which governs, retire the rest visibly, then improve. Improving first is how businesses end up doing this exercise twice.