What to check before you sign a 24 or 36 month contract

A 24 or 36 month term is not, by itself, a bad deal. It is how device funding gets paid for and it is why a fleet price is a fleet price. But it is three years of a business’s connectivity decided in one afternoon, and the questions that matter are rarely the ones asked in the meeting.

Here is what to check before you sign, in the order that costs the most to get wrong.

1. What the term is actually buying

There are two different reasons to commit to a term, and they lead to different plans.

If you need handsets, the term is funding hardware. That is what a Tech Fund plan is for — the device money is built into the plan across the term rather than sitting in a separate agreement. If you do not need handsets, you are committing for the plan rate alone, and the right question is what that term is worth to you compared with the flexibility you give up.

Be clear about which of those you are doing. Businesses regularly sign a device-funded term for staff who are perfectly happy with the phones they already have.

2. What happens when headcount changes

This is the question that separates a plan that survives three years from one that has to be renegotiated in eighteen months.

Ask specifically: what happens when we add people, and what happens when we lose them. Added services generally start their own term from the day they connect, which means that after a year of hiring your fleet has term end dates scattered across the calendar rather than one clean renewal. That is normal and it is manageable, but only if you know it is happening. Ask for a list of term end dates by service at least once a year.

On the way down, be honest with yourself about your headcount trajectory. A term sized for the team you hope to have is an expensive way to be optimistic.

3. The exit number, in writing, before you sign

Every contracted voice service carries an early termination charge, calculated from the monthly fee and the number of months left to run. Data-only services on month-to-month terms do not.

The percentage matters less than the habit: before you sign, ask what it would cost to exit in year one and in year two, and get the answer in writing. Not because you plan to leave, but because that number is the real size of the commitment, and it is the number your finance team will want if circumstances change.

It is also the number that tells you whether a longer term is worth the lower monthly rate. A 36 month term at a better rate is only better if you are confident about year three.

4. Whether everything sits on one account

Shared data only works inside a single billing account. If part of your fleet is on a separate account — a legacy account from an acquisition, a site that was set up independently, a director’s services billed personally — those services are not sharing with anything, and you are paying for allowances in isolation.

Consolidating is usually the single largest saving available to a fleet, and it is much easier to do at the point of signing than halfway through a term. Ask for it to be part of the deal rather than a later project.

5. What the plan does when you run out

On the current business range there is no excess data charge in Australia — services drop to a reduced speed, up to 2Mbps, until the next billing period. That is a very different risk profile from per-gigabyte overage, and it should change how much allowance you buy. If you are being quoted a fleet with a large safety margin built in, ask what it is protecting you from.

Overseas is the exception. Roaming data is charged, so the travel question deserves its own answer: who travels, where, how often, and what is included before anything is billed.

6. Which services do not need to be phones

Before you sign for twenty voice services, work out how many of them are actually used for calls. Tablets, routers, cameras, card terminals and site devices belong on data-only plans, which are cheaper to run, can stay month to month and can draw on the same shared pool.

The constraint to check is that data-only services have no calls and no SMS beyond emergency and whitelisted numbers — so anything that receives a verification code or has to be answered by a person stays on a voice plan.

7. The Critical Information Summary, not the slide

Ask for the Critical Information Summary for every plan you are being sold, and read it before signing rather than after. Where a briefing pack, a rate card, an email or a sales presentation disagrees with the CIS, the CIS is the document that governs the contract. This is not a hypothetical gap — the same plan can be described three different ways across three internal documents, and only one of them is binding.

8. Who answers when it goes wrong

The hardest thing to compare across quotes, and usually the thing that determines whether the next three years are pleasant. Find out who you call when a service stops working at 4pm on a Friday, whether that person knows your account without being told, and whether the person who sold you the deal is the person who manages it afterwards.

A rate is easy to match. Somebody picking up the phone is not.

A checklist you can take into the meeting

Is this term funding devices, or just the plan rate? What happens to the term when we add or remove people? What does it cost to exit in year one and year two, in writing? Is every service on one billing account? What happens when the data runs out, here and overseas? How many of these services actually need to make calls? Can I see the CIS for each plan? Who do I call, and do they know who I am?

If a quote cannot answer those eight questions, it is not yet a quote — it is a price.

Getting a straight answer for your fleet

Before that conversation, the business connectivity health check is a quick way to see where your current setup is weakest.

We price on the size of your fleet rather than off a rate card, so the first thing we do is count what you actually run and what each service is used for. Tell us that much and we will come back with the structure and the number, and with the eight answers above written down.