TermForge — Contract Terms & Unclaimed Entitlement Command Center

Your contracts already price a late payment, a fourth revision, a cancellation in week three. Nothing you own reads them back against what you actually charged.

A contract generator writes the clause and never looks at it again. An invoicing tool stores the invoice and knows nothing about what the contract said. Nobody joins the two, so nobody can answer the only question the clauses were written to settle: did any of them ever do anything? TermForge joins them, and the answer is usually uncomfortable.

The number nobody computes

THE UNPULLED LEVER. Of the money your own signed contracts entitled you to, what share did you actually charge? In the worked book that ships with it: entitled to £999,625, charged £828,863 — 82.9% of the money, but only 37.7% of the occasions. Both are printed, because they disagree and the disagreement is the finding: the large obvious entitlements get claimed and the small ones do not. Quote one alone and the practice looks either healthy or negligent, and neither is true.

Nothing in that figure is an estimate. An invoice issued on the 3rd and paid on the 61st is 31 days past a 30-day term, and the contract says in writing what 31 days is worth. Every row behind it is a rate you wrote multiplied by a quantity taken from two dates you already had.

The distinction the whole thing is built on

You type four things: a contract, an invoice, an event, and what you did about it. The first three are facts. The fourth is a decision. Where no decision exists, nobody decided — and that absence is the entire subject of the application, which is why it is stored as an absence rather than as a zero.

A system that defaults the missing decision to “waived” has quietly asserted that you meant to. One that defaults it to “owed” has quietly asserted that you did not. This one counts it: in the worked book nobody decided either way on 194 of 382 occasions, worth £79,485, against £92,514 that was waived on purpose.

The identity that has to close

ENTITLED + OVER-CHARGED = CHARGED + WAIVED + UNNOTICED. It closes to exactly nought on every row, under every accrual rule, grace period and settling window, and the residual is printed on screen whether it is nought or not.

It closes exactly rather than nearly because UNNOTICED is not measured: it is defined as what is left when the two things you did are taken off the thing you could have done. There is nothing in it to round away. Over-charging sits on the left-hand side rather than being netted off the right — 19 rows in the worked book were charged £1,238 beyond what the clause supported, and the commonest cause is interest run from the day the invoice was issued rather than the day it fell due, which over-charges by exactly the payment term, every time, invisibly.

The mechanism, on one screen

UP FRONT OR IN ARREARS. A term that falls due before the work is delivered gets priced into an invoice the client is already expecting. A term that falls due afterwards requires going back and asking for more than they were braced for. The first kind is claimed on 94.4% of occasions; the second on 24.5%. That is 69.9 points, with a 95% interval of 62.8–77.1 that does not come near zero — and it is a comparison of two proportions, not two sums of money, so nothing about the size of the amounts produces it.

The screen that argues with the rest of the application

CLIENTS YOU SUBSIDISE. Everything else here declines to tell you to charge. This screen puts a name and a number on not charging, which is a different thing, and then says plainly that a subsidy can be the right call. In the worked book one client is carried at 21.8% of what they pay and another at 0.14%. The application has no opinion on which is correct, because nothing in a ledger knows what a relationship is worth — but a discount you did not know you were giving is not a strategy.

What it refuses to do

No claim rate at all under twenty settled entitlements; none for a clause under six occasions, or a client under four, with the floor printed beside every refusal. Nothing that fell due inside the last sixty days is counted as missed, and the current part-quarter is withheld entirely — otherwise the most recent period is the worst one every time you open the file. It will never tell you to charge, never draft or assess a clause, never guess a decision you did not record, and never net an over-charge off an under-charge. And the £232,039 of clauses you did not write stays off every total, on a screen of its own, because you never had a right to any of it.

What else is in it

Twenty-one screens. Every entitlement, invoice and contract as a ledger you can filter. The clause book, showing what rate your own contracts actually use, so the next one is priced against your book rather than a template you downloaded. How late things get, printed as a distribution rather than an average, because every interest figure in the file is computed from it. Quarter by quarter. How much book you would need before a movement means anything. Nine calculators and six documents that fill themselves from your own figures, including a late-payment notice that quotes the clause, the dates and the figure — and offers not to apply it. Double-click the file and it opens in your browser: no account, no installation and no network request of any kind. It works with the wi-fi off, and no client name, fee or rate of yours ever leaves the machine.

A 21-sheet companion workbook. Every observation is a typed value and every conclusion is a live formula reading it, not a picture of a number. Change one payment date on the Invoices sheet and the entitlement, the partition, the claim rate, the up-front split and every cut move with it. The Lever sheet carries the identity check as a residual column that is nought on every row, and a final sheet lists what the workbook refuses to compute and why.

Two guides and a licence. Twenty minutes from opening the file to putting a real contract in, and a screen-by-screen reference that spends as much time on where the software stops as on what it does.

One note on your own data: you need the column most invoicing tools do not keep — what the contract said. Ten contracts with their rates typed in, and the invoices you already have, is enough to read most of the screens. It is not legal advice and it has not read your contracts; it reads back the rates you entered yourself.