Terms of service
About these terms
ApprovalScribe is a service provided by Patrick Dela Plana (ABN 58 737 963 643), Queensland, Australia.
These terms are the agreement between you and us for your use of ApprovalScribe. "We", "us" and "our" mean the supplier named above. "You" means the person or organisation that holds the account.
You accept these terms when you create an account. We record which version of these terms you accepted and the time you accepted them.
The effective date of this version is shown at the top of this page.
What the service is, and what it is not
ApprovalScribe is an approval workflow tool. You upload documents, name the people who need to review them, and choose whether they review in parallel or in sequence. We give each reviewer their own link, route the request, send the notifications the workflow needs, and record each decision and comment.
Reviewers do not create an account and never sign in. They act using the link you caused us to send them.
ApprovalScribe is not an e-signature product. It does not produce a legally binding signature, it issues no certificate, and it does not verify the identity of a reviewer. What it records is that a link sent to an email address you supplied was opened and used to approve, reject or comment. If you need a binding signature, use a signing service. ApprovalScribe is built to sit before or alongside signing.
We claim no compliance certification for the service. Whether ApprovalScribe suits an obligation you are under is your assessment to make, not ours.
Your account
An account belongs to one person, identified by an email address you verify when you sign up. You sign in with a password, and you can reset it by email.
You give your full name when you sign up. That name is shown to the reviewers you invite, as the sender of the request, so it needs to be a name you are willing for them to see.
You are responsible for what is done through your account. Keep your password to yourself, and treat any link we email you for confirming your address or resetting your password as a credential: until it is used or expires, whoever holds it can reach your account.
Tell us if you believe someone else has reached your account. Contact details are at the end of this document.
Plans, credits and payment
A new account receives a one-time grant of five documents. It is a lifetime grant, not a monthly one, and it does not reset.
Charging is per document, not per request. One document is one credit, so a request carrying five documents consumes five credits. The number of reviewers on a request never changes what it costs.
Credits are consumed when a request is sent, not when a document is uploaded or a draft is saved. A request that cannot be paid for in full cannot be sent. Cancelling or deleting a request after it is sent does not return the credits.
Solo is a paid plan bought as a prepaid term. It carries a document allowance for that term.
Document packs can be bought on any plan, including the free one. Pack credits do not expire. Your plan allowance is always spent first, so pack credits are never used while allowance remains.
Running out of credits blocks new requests until you buy more. It never affects a request already sent — reviewers can always finish one that is in flight.
There are limits on how large a single file may be and how many documents one request may carry. They differ between the free plan and Solo, and they are separate from the credits you spend. If you go past one, the app refuses the file and tells you what the limit is.
Prices are shown before you buy. We are not registered for GST, so no GST is charged on what you pay us.
Payments are taken through Stripe, our payment provider, on a page Stripe hosts. We do not receive or store your card details.
Nothing renews automatically
ApprovalScribe has no subscription and no automatic renewal. A Solo term is prepaid and it stops when it ends. Document packs are one-off purchases.
We do not store a recurring payment arrangement, and we will not charge you again unless you buy again.
When a Solo term ends, the allowance and the paid features that came with it end too. Your account and its history remain. Pack credits you already hold are not affected, because they do not expire.
Refunds
Purchases are non-refundable. That applies to a prepaid Solo term and to document packs, whether or not the credits have been used. We do not offer a cooling-off period.
This does not limit your rights under the Australian Consumer Law. Those rights include guarantees that cannot be excluded by an agreement — among them that services are supplied with due care and skill and are fit for any purpose we said they were fit for. If a guarantee is not met you may be entitled to a remedy, including a refund, and nothing in these terms takes that away.
If something has gone wrong with a purchase, email us before anything else. Most of it we can simply sort out.
Acceptable use
Upload only documents you are entitled to send, and invite only reviewers you have a reason to contact. Adding a reviewer causes us to send email from our domain to the address you supplied, so an address you should not be emailing is a problem you create for both of us.
Do not use ApprovalScribe to send unsolicited bulk email, and do not use it to store or send material that is unlawful or that you have no right to distribute.
Each reviewer link is distinct and opens only that reviewer’s view of the request. Do not pass a link to someone it was not issued to, and do not try to reach a request, a document or an account that is not yours, including by guessing or altering a link.
Do not do anything that puts the availability or the security of the service at risk for other customers.
We may suspend an account we reasonably believe is being used in any of these ways. See the section on ending this agreement.
Your documents and your reviewers
The documents you upload and the details you enter stay yours. We claim no ownership of them. You give us the permission we need to run the service for you: to store your documents, show them to the reviewers you named, and send the messages the workflow requires.
You warrant that you have a lawful basis for the personal information you give us about reviewers, including their names and email addresses, and that you may pass it to us for this purpose. You choose the reviewers and you hold the relationship with them, so that basis is yours to hold.
How we handle personal information is set out in our privacy policy.
Availability
We do not promise any particular level of availability. No uptime figure is offered and none should be read into this document.
The service is provided as it stands at the time you use it. We may change it, add to it, or withdraw parts of it.
We may take the service down for maintenance. Parts of it also depend on other providers — hosting, email delivery and payments — which can fail without us.
Liability
Nothing in this section excludes the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law, or any other right that the law does not allow us to exclude. Where the law lets us limit our liability for failing to meet one of those guarantees, our liability is limited to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.
Beyond that, and as far as the law allows: we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits or lost business, or for loss or corruption of data; and our total liability to you across all claims is limited to the total amount you have paid us for the service.
Keep your own copies of anything you need to retain. You can export your data from your account settings, and you should do so before deleting anything you may need later.
We are not responsible for the decisions your reviewers make or for what follows from them. An approval recorded in ApprovalScribe is a record of what a reviewer did. It is not advice, and it is not a signature.
Ending this agreement
You can stop using ApprovalScribe whenever you like.
To have your account and its documents removed, email us from the address on the account and we will do it for you. Deleting the account yourself is not available yet.
Deleting an account removes the workspace, its approval requests and its stored documents. Open review links stop working immediately, and reviewers lose access to decisions they were part-way through. It cannot be undone, so export your data first if you need a record.
We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or that we are required to act on by law. Where we can, we will tell you first and say what would fix it.
Ending this agreement does not entitle you to a refund of a prepaid term or of unused credits. See the section on refunds, including what it says about the Australian Consumer Law.
Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. Each version carries an effective date, shown at the top of this page, and the current version is always the one published here.
We record the version of these terms you accepted at the time you accepted it, and we do not go back and change that record when a new version is published.
If you keep using ApprovalScribe after a new version takes effect, that version applies to you. If you do not want to accept it, stop using the service and ask us to close your account.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts that hear appeals from them.
This applies wherever you use the service from. It does not remove any protection you have under consumer law where you live that cannot be contracted out of.
If part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest keeps working.
Contact
Email patrick@approvalscribe.com.
That address reaches us about these terms, about a purchase, about your account, and to ask for an account and its documents to be removed. Write from the address on the account when the question is about the account itself.