Terms of service.

What this is

Pascal is software for UK trade businesses: enquiries, quotes, jobs, BS 7671 certificates, invoices and the paperwork around them. You subscribe to use it. These terms are the agreement between you and Pascal Software Ltd, and they apply from the moment you tick the box at checkout.

Three other documents form part of the same agreement, and between them they cover most of what people actually want to know:

• the refunds and cancellation policy, for when money comes back;
• the privacy notice, for what we do with information about you;
• the data processing agreement, for what we do with information about your clients, which is a different thing and is governed differently.

If any of them contradicts this page on a data protection question, the data processing agreement wins. On anything else, this page does.

This is business software

Pascal is sold to businesses, for business use. When you subscribe you are confirming that you are buying it for the purposes of a trade, business or profession, that you are at least 18, and that you can commit the business you are buying it for.

That has a consequence worth stating plainly. Consumer protection law, including the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the cancellation rights in the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, does not apply to this agreement. In particular there is no cooling-off period and no refund for changing your mind: what you have paid for is yours until it runs out, and cancelling stops the next payment rather than returning the last one. The refunds policy sets out the two cases where money does come back.

Everything the product does is described on the features and pricing pages before you are asked for a card, and both are honest about what is not built yet. Nothing is held back until after checkout.

How you agree to this

You tick a box on the checkout page before you are sent to pay. We record which version of these terms you agreed to, and when. Nobody is charged before that tick.

If somebody invites you into a company that already subscribes, you did not tick anything, and you do not need to. Your employer agreed on the company's behalf, and you use Pascal under their account and on these terms.

Your account and the people on it

The account belongs to the company, not to any one person. Whoever subscribes becomes its first admin, and an admin can invite and remove people up to the number of users the plan includes. Core is a single user by design. On Pro you can buy more from the billing screen, in blocks of five.

A login belongs to one named person. Do not share it, and do not pass it round the van. Two people who need Pascal need two users, which costs a good deal less than an argument about who signed what. We limit how many devices one login can be signed in on at once, so a shared password eventually signs somebody out mid-job.

Keep your password to yourself and turn on two factor authentication or a passkey if you can. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you. A certificate signed with your credentials is signed by you, and the signature image you upload is yours to control. If you think somebody else has got into your account, email support@pascalsoftware.co.uk straight away.

You are responsible for what the people on your account do with it, including anything they put in and anything they send out.

Signing off work is still your job

Pascal produces documents from what you type into it. It does not test an installation, it does not check your readings, and it cannot tell whether you were competent to do the work. You are the competent person. The certificate is yours, the signature is yours, and so is the responsibility that comes with both.

Pascal is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by the IET, BSI, or any competent person scheme. The forms follow what BS 7671 requires a certificate to record, and we keep them current, but they are our forms and we do not describe them as anybody else's. Nothing on this site is a claim that a document produced in Pascal is an IET model form.

Pascal does not produce Building Regulations compliance certificates. That document comes from your competent person scheme after you notify the work, and no software can issue it in their place.

Everything Pascal suggests is a suggestion. Observation wordings and their classification codes, circuit details read off a photograph, prompts about what to check: all of it is there to save you typing, and none of it is a professional opinion. Satisfy yourself that a figure is right before you put your name to it.

What you pay, and when

• Every price we publish excludes VAT. Where we are required to charge VAT we add it, and you see the total including it before you pay.
• If we become registered for VAT, we will email you at least 30 days before it first appears on a bill. If the rate itself changes we will tell you as soon as we know, though the date that takes effect is not ours to choose. Either way it never applies part way through a period you have already paid for.
• Subscriptions are paid in advance, monthly or for a year up front. A year costs ten months.
• Payment is taken by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
• Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel it.
• Extra users are charged as a separate line on the same subscription. Adding one is charged when you add it; removing one takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for.
• If a renewal payment fails we email you and your account keeps working for one more day. If the money still has not arrived at the end of it, everybody in the company is locked out until it does. Nothing is deleted while you are locked out.
• Prices can change. Never in the middle of a period you have paid for, and never without at least 30 days' notice by email, which gives you time to cancel instead.
• A discount code is worth what we told you it was worth when you applied it, and no more. Only one discount runs on a subscription at a time, so applying a new one replaces the old one rather than stacking on top of it. We can stop issuing a code at any time, which does not affect anybody already on it.
• Enterprise is quoted and invoiced separately, and the payment terms are whatever we agreed in writing with you.

Cancelling

Cancel whenever you like from your billing screen. No notice period and no phone call. You keep working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and you are not charged again. Nothing is refunded for the part you did not use. The refunds and cancellation policy sets out the cases where money does come back.

Fair use

There are no hard caps on the ordinary work of running a trade business. Raise as many certificates, quotes and invoices as you need, store the photographs that go with them, and email them to the people they are for. We are not going to count your jobs.

Two things are metered, because each one costs us money every time it runs:

• Reading a board off a photograph. A Pro feature, and one Core does not include at all. Pro comes with a set number of reads each calendar month, currently a hundred, and there is a spending ceiling behind that figure as a backstop. An unusually large board costs more than a small one, so on rare occasions the ceiling is what stops you rather than the count. Either way the certificate wizard tells you where you are once you are close, the feature waits for the month to turn over, and nothing else stops working.
  A hundred is a lot of boards for one company in a month, so we expect most people never to reach it. If it turns out people do, we will look at ways of letting you raise it. What that would look like is an open question, and so is whether it happens at all, and we would rather answer both against what people actually use than guess now. Tell us if you are hitting the limit. Nothing in this paragraph is a commitment or a date.
• Email we send on your behalf. Sending a quote, an invoice or a certificate to a client is ordinary use. Sending a newsletter to two thousand addresses is not, and Pascal has no feature for it.

Beyond that, fair use means what it sounds like. Use it for your own business, through the interface, at the pace a person works. What is not fair, and what we will ask you to stop doing: sharing one login between several people, running a second company's work through an account bought for one, reselling access, scripted or bulk requests against the service, and using Pascal as general file storage for things that have nothing to do with your work.

If your use is genuinely and repeatedly out of proportion to what you are paying, we will talk to you about it first and give you a reasonable chance to change it or move up a tier. Nobody is getting cut off mid-inspection over a usage graph.

What you must not do with it

• Break the law, or help anybody else to.
• Issue a certificate for work you did not carry out or supervise, or sign as somebody you are not.
• Store information you have no right to hold, or use a client record for something the client would not expect.
• Put special category data into Pascal. Health, racial or ethnic origin, religion, politics, trade union membership, genetics, biometrics, sex life or sexual orientation, and criminal offence data. The notes fields are there for the job, not for the household. Pascal is not built to hold this kind of information and we do not want it.
• Upload anything malicious, attack the service, probe it for weaknesses without our written permission, or try to get round a limit, a licence check or another company's data boundary.
• Copy, decompile or reverse engineer the software, or use it to build a competing product.
• Take other people's copyrighted material, including published guidance and standards, and load it in to be republished from Pascal.

If we find an account being used this way we can suspend it, and we will tell you what we found and why. Where it is safe to do so, we will ask you to fix it before we suspend anything.

The AI features

One part of Pascal uses an AI model: you photograph a distribution board, and the circuit schedule comes back filled in for you to check. It is worth understanding what that means before you rely on it.

• Nothing the model produces reaches a certificate on its own. It arrives as a proposal, and it sits there until a person reviews it and approves it. You can change any of it, and you can throw all of it away.
• It gets things wrong. The same photograph can read differently on two attempts, because that is how these models behave. We run a set of BS 7671 checks over whatever comes back and flag what looks implausible, but those checks catch what can be checked, not everything that can be wrong.
• Checking the result is your job and it is not optional. A circuit reference, a breaker rating or an RCD figure taken from a photograph without being read back against the board is a mistake on a signed document, and it is your name on it.
• The photograph is sent to an AI provider outside the United Kingdom to be read. We name them in the list of who touches your data, we have data protection terms with each of them, and none of them may use what we send to train their models. Four things go: the photograph, the names of your own saved circuit templates, which end of the board to count from, and whether you have recorded the board as three-phase. Your client's name and address do not.
• We do not train models on your data, and we never will without asking you first in terms you would recognise as asking.
• We keep up to sixty board photographs across all customers, with the corrections engineers made to them, so we can measure how accurate the feature actually is. The privacy notice sets out how long we hold them and how to tell us you would rather we did not. It takes one email and costs you nothing.

Email that Pascal sends for you

When you send a quote, an invoice or a certificate to a client, it leaves our mail systems with replies pointed back at you. In substance you are the sender. You are responsible for what is in it and for having a reason to be emailing that person at all, including under the marketing rules if what you send is marketing.

One thing that surprises people, so here it is up front. If an address hard bounces or somebody marks a message as spam, we stop sending to that address, and that block applies across the whole service rather than to your company alone. We do it to protect the deliverability of everybody's mail, including yours. Correct the address and ask us, and we will look at it.

Your data is yours

Everything you put into Pascal stays yours: clients, properties, jobs, certificates, photographs, prices, the lot. You give us permission to host it, back it up, and put it through the parts of the service you are using, and that permission exists so we can run the product for you. It ends when the agreement does.

For information about your clients, you are the data controller and we are your processor. The data processing agreement is where that relationship is written down, and it forms part of these terms. For information about you and your own staff, in our capacity as the company you buy software from, we are the controller and the privacy notice explains what we do.

We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.

When you leave you can have it back. Tell us and we will export it in a usable format at no charge, and the data processing agreement sets out how that works. While you are still subscribed we can usually do the same on request, but it is assembled by hand, so give us reasonable notice and expect us to ask you to cover the time on a large or repeated job.

What happens to your records at the end

Cancelling deletes nothing. Everything sits exactly where you left it and comes straight back if you subscribe again.

You decide when it goes. Ask us to delete it and we will, within 30 days. Say nothing and we keep it for twelve months after the subscription ends, then delete it, having emailed the admins on the account at least 30 days beforehand. The twelve months are there so that nobody loses a certificate they needed for a job in five years' time because they forgot to ask for it on the way out.

Records we have to keep for tax and accounting, such as what you paid us and when, are kept for six years regardless. That is HMRC's requirement, not ours.

Keeping it running

We provide Pascal with reasonable skill and care, and we take backups. Beyond that we make no promises about availability. There is no uptime guarantee, no service level agreement, no target we are measuring ourselves against and no credit if it is down. Maintenance happens, things break, and third parties we depend on have their own bad days. If you need a guaranteed level of service, that is an Enterprise conversation and a different price; ask and we will have it.

That is also the whole of what we promise about the product itself. Pascal is sold as it stands, and beyond what this page says in so many words no other warranty, condition or term is implied into this agreement, whether by statute, common law or otherwise, to the fullest extent the law allows. In particular we do not promise that it is free of errors, that it will run without interruption, or that it suits a purpose you have not told us about in writing and we have not agreed to. If something in it is wrong, tell us and we will put it right; that is how software gets fixed, and it is the remedy we are offering.

We improve the product constantly, which means it changes. We can add features, change how something works, and occasionally withdraw something. If we are removing something you rely on we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and if that is the end of it for you, cancel and we will refund the unused part of your period.

Some things on the pricing and features pages carry a "coming soon" mark. That mark means exactly what it says: the thing is not built yet, and nothing on this site is a promise about when it will be. What you are buying is what works today.

Things Pascal connects to

Pascal can connect to other services, Xero being the current one, and Stripe takes your subscription payments. Your relationship with them is yours, on their terms, and we are not responsible for what they do or for what it costs you. If one of them changes its rules, its prices or its access, we may have to change or withdraw the connection, and we will tell you if that happens.

What belongs to us

The software, the brand, the design, the forms, the calculations and the reference material inside Pascal belong to us or to the people who licensed them to us. You get the right to use them while you subscribe, and nothing more than that. That right is not exclusive, not transferable, and ends when the agreement does.

If you tell us how to make Pascal better, we can act on it without owing you anything. Ideas from customers are how most of this got built and we would rather hear them than protect ourselves from them.

Keeping each other's confidences

Neither of us will pass on the other's confidential information or use it for anything other than this agreement. That covers your business information as much as ours. It does not cover anything already public, anything either of us already knew, or anything we are legally required to hand over, in which case we will tell you unless we are not allowed to.

Ending it from our side

We can end this agreement with 30 days' notice by email. We can end it or suspend your account immediately if you seriously breach these terms, if you use Pascal unlawfully, or if you do not pay.

We can also suspend access, for as long as it takes and no longer, where we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect Pascal, our other customers or the public: a login we think has been compromised, an attack coming from your account, a court order or a regulator telling us to. We will tell you what we have done and why as soon as we safely can, and we will lift it as soon as the reason has gone. A suspension of that kind is not us ending the agreement and nothing is deleted while it stands; if it turns out to have been nothing you did, and it lasted more than a day, we add the time back onto your period.

If we end it for our own reasons rather than for something you did, we refund the unused part of what you have paid. If we end it because of something you did, we do not.

Where we stand if something goes wrong

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit.

Subject to that, and however a claim is framed, whether in contract, in negligence or any other tort, for breach of statutory duty or otherwise, being straightforward about it:

• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost contracts, lost goodwill, lost anticipated savings, or work you could not do during an outage.
• We are not liable for loss or corruption of your data to the extent you could reasonably have kept your own copy. We take backups and we test them, and you can ask us for an export of your records so that a copy exists somewhere that is not us. Do that from time to time.
• We are not liable for a penalty, a rejected notification or a professional consequence that follows from what you put on a certificate. That document is your professional judgement, not ours.
• We are not liable for the acts of a service you connected Pascal to, or for what happens after data leaves us on your instructions.
• For everything else, our total liability to you, taking every claim together, is capped at the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event you are claiming about and £500.

That cap is set with the price in mind. Pascal costs a few hundred pounds a year, and neither of us intends it to carry the risk of a job worth a great deal more. If you need it to, that is an insurance conversation and we are happy to have it.

You will cover us, including our reasonable legal costs, for a claim somebody else brings against us because of content you put into Pascal, email you sent through it, or the way you used it, where doing so broke these terms or the law. That promise is not capped: those are things only you could have controlled, and the person bringing the claim will not have agreed to any cap of ours. In return we will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you take over its defence if you want to, and not settle it in your name without asking you first.

Anything else you might owe us under this agreement is capped the same way our liability is, at the greater of a year's fees and £500, except where it arises from your own deliberate wrongdoing.

Changes to these terms

We will email you at least 30 days before any change that matters to you, and the date at the top of this page tells you which version you are reading. If you do not want to accept a change, cancel before it takes effect and we will refund the unused part of your period. Carrying on using Pascal after the date is taken as accepting it.

Corrections that do not change what anybody is agreeing to, such as fixing a broken link or a spelling, we just make.

If you want to complain

Email support@pascalsoftware.co.uk. We read everything that arrives and we will come back to you as quickly as we can, though we do not commit to a particular turnaround. If it is a contractual matter rather than something wrong with the product, admin@pascalsoftware.co.uk is the better address. If we cannot agree, both of us will talk properly before either of us goes near a solicitor. If talking does not settle it, either of us can ask for mediation before anybody issues a claim, with a mediator we choose between us or, failing agreement within 14 days, one appointed by the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution, and the mediator's fee split equally. Neither of us will refuse that unreasonably. None of this stops either of us going to court for an injunction, or to recover money that is plainly owed.

Complaints about data protection have their own route with its own timescales, set out in the privacy notice, along with your right to take it to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Found a security problem? Email admin@pascalsoftware.co.uk with "security" in the subject and we will come back to you. Report it and we will not treat looking for it as a breach of these terms, so long as you did not take anybody's data with you.

The usual small print

• These documents are the whole agreement between us. Neither of us is relying on anything said beforehand that is not written down here, which does not stop either of us relying on something said fraudulently.
• You cannot transfer this agreement to somebody else without our written consent, which we will not withhold for no reason. We can transfer it if the business is sold or reorganised, and we will tell you.
• We use other companies to help run the service, listed in the who touches your data page, and we stay responsible to you for what they do.
• Neither of us is in breach for something genuinely outside our control, such as a flood or a failure of the internet itself.
• Either of us can end this immediately if the other stops paying its debts, goes into administration or liquidation, or enters an arrangement with its creditors.
• Notices go by email, to the address on your account and to the address at the bottom of this page. A notice counts as received the next working day after it is sent, unless it bounces.
• Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent or partner. Pascal sends email and pushes invoices on your instruction, and doing so does not make us your representative.
• The parts of this that are meant to outlast it do: what you owe us, confidentiality, our intellectual property, the limits on liability, the indemnity, and what happens to your records at the end. Confidentiality runs for five years after the agreement finishes, and forever for anything that is a genuine trade secret.
• Nobody who is not you or us has any right to enforce this agreement.
• If a court decides one part of this is unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. There is deliberately no arbitration clause: a dispute over software costing a few hundred pounds a year belongs in the county court, where it costs neither of us much to bring, and we would rather that than a process only one side can afford.