The terms for using CostCode

CostCode is a business name of Shopscope Pty Ltd (ABN 73 656 540 313), a company registered in Victoria, Australia (“we”, “us”).

“You” means the business that creates an organisation on CostCode. The person who creates it accepts these terms for that business and confirms they are allowed to. Everyone you invite uses CostCode under these terms too, and you are responsible for what they do in your organisation.

CostCode is a service for businesses. If the Australian Consumer Law treats you as a consumer anyway, section 10 explains what that means here.

CostCode reads the supplier invoices you give it and checks each line: against the rates you have agreed with that supplier and recorded in CostCode, against what you have paid that supplier before once there is enough history, and against the basic requirements of a tax invoice (an ABN printed on it, GST no more than ten per cent). It looks for an invoice you have already been sent. Each invoice ends up cleared, held with the evidence for the hold, or waiting for a person to look at it.

A line CostCode had nothing to check against is shown as unverified, never as passed. If our reading of an invoice does not reconcile with the invoice's own total, we treat that as our mistake: the invoice goes to a person to review, and no finding is raised against your supplier.

CostCode can draft a query to a supplier about a held invoice. It never sends one on its own. A supplier only hears from CostCode when a person in your organisation reviews the message and presses send, and email to suppliers is switched off for a new organisation until you switch it on.

• It will not catch every overcharge, duplicate or error. It checks what it can check with the rates and history you have given it, and tells you plainly which lines it could not check.
• It reads documents by machine, and a reading can be wrong. Before you rely on a finding to withhold a payment or to raise it with a supplier, look at the original invoice, which CostCode shows alongside.
• It does not give financial, legal, tax or accounting advice. Whether to pay an invoice, and what to say to a supplier, is always your decision.
• We do not promise any amount of savings or recoveries.

• Give us accurate details, and use an email address you control. Throwaway inbox addresses are not accepted.
• Keep your sign-in secure. Tell us straight away at hello@costcode.co if you think someone else has used it.
• One account belongs to one person. Invite your colleagues rather than sharing a sign-in.
• Each business gets one Free plan. Creating extra organisations to get more free invoices is not allowed.

Your invoices, rates, findings and everything else your organisation puts into CostCode belong to you. You give us permission to store and process them only to run CostCode for you: to read them, check them, show them to the people in your organisation, and keep them safe. We do not sell your data, and no other customer can see it.

We also keep a separate record of prices from invoice lines (the product, the rate, the unit, the state and the date), with your business and your supplier replaced by coded identifiers that link back to nobody once your organisation is deleted. Nothing in CostCode reads that record today, and no other customer or supplier can see it. If we ever use it, it will only be as combined figures that cannot identify you or your suppliers.

You must have the right to give us the documents you upload. How we handle personal information, where your data is stored and which services help us run CostCode are set out in our Privacy and data handling page, which forms part of these terms.

You can delete your organisation from Settings. That deletes your invoices, findings and everything else your organisation holds in CostCode.

You agree not to:

• use CostCode for anything unlawful, or upload material you have no right to share;
• try to get around the limits on your plan, including by creating more than one Free organisation;
• try to reach another organisation's data, test or break our security, or disrupt the service;
• copy, scrape or resell CostCode, or build a competing product from it;
• use CostCode to send suppliers anything misleading, abusive or unlawful. What you send is yours to stand behind.

The plans, what each includes and what each costs are on our pricing page. The fees for your plan are the ones shown there when you subscribe.

• The Free plan has a monthly allowance of invoices and needs no card. When the allowance is used up, further invoices wait until the next month or until you upgrade.
• Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, by card through our payment provider, Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
• Invoices past a paid plan's monthly allowance are charged at that plan's per-invoice rate, billed in arrears: with the next monthly charge, or at renewal on a yearly plan.
• Prices are in Australian dollars. We are not registered for GST, so no GST is charged and our invoices are not tax invoices. If we register, we will tell you at least 30 days before we start charging you GST.
• If a payment fails, we will tell you and give you time to fix it. If it stays unpaid, we may move your organisation to the Free plan.
• We may change our prices. We will tell you at least 30 days before a change affects you, and it takes effect from your next billing period.

You can cancel a paid plan at any time from the billing page in Settings. Your plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for and then moves to Free. We do not refund part periods, except where the law requires it.

We may suspend or close an organisation that breaks these terms or leaves fees unpaid. Unless the breach is serious or the law requires otherwise, we will tell you first and give you a reasonable chance to put it right.

If we ever stop offering CostCode, we will give you at least 30 days' notice and refund any fees you have paid for time after it stops.

We keep improving CostCode, so features will change. We work to keep it available but cannot promise it will never be interrupted.

If we change these terms, we publish the new version here with a new date, and the owner of each organisation is asked to accept it in CostCode. If you do not accept a change, you can cancel before it affects you.

Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or changes any right or remedy you have under that law or any other law that cannot be excluded.

Where the law lets us limit our liability for failing to meet one of those guarantees, our liability is limited to supplying the services again, or paying the cost of having them supplied again.

Otherwise, to the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profit or lost data, however it arises;
• we are not liable for any amount you paid to a supplier, including an overcharge or duplicate CostCode did not identify, or for what a supplier does in response to a message you sent;
• our total liability to you is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event that caused the loss.

You are responsible for loss we suffer because you broke section 6, to the extent the law allows.

These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia, and the courts of Victoria (and the courts that hear appeals from them) can decide any dispute about them. Before going to court, please write to us so we can try to sort it out.

Questions about these terms, or anything else: hello@costcode.co.