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WHO CAN SALES PERSON SIGN CONTRACT
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Ken,
Can one of my salespeople sign the contract or does an officer of the company have to?
Michael A
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RESPONSE
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Anyone you designate can sign on behalf of your company, so a salesman who you authorize can sign the subscriber contracts. If your subscriber signs the contract and you begin performance it's good bet that the contract will be enforced even if you don't sign it. Furthermore, if one of your employees has "apparent" authority and signs the contract it's a good bet that the subscriber will be able to hold you to the contract. This issue may arise if your employee brings you a fully executed contract and you then decide not to do the job. Your subscriber could sue for the deferrence between what the job actual cost and what it agreed to pay you, assume that produces a positive number. I think that a salesman has apparent authority to sign the contract.
Some companies like to include a provision that the contract is not fully executed until an officer of the company signs the contract. I don't include that provision in the Standard Form Agreements [it certainly can be added] because I find it too cumbersome a process for the contract to be brought back to the company for signature and then delivered to the subscriber. It's not often an issue but could be on a large commercial job that is completely wrongly estimated, designed or where too many important contract provisions are omitted from the approved form.
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IS IT TIME TO UPDATE YOUR FIRE ALARM AGREEMENT
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You need to update your contracts often, at least as often as you re-evaluate the equipment and systems you use on your installations. Here's one quick way to review your fire alarm agreement to see if should be updated. Check to see how the central station monitoring company is referred to. If it's referred to a the "central station", "monitoring center" or "facility" or "central office" then it's time to update. The proper terminology, if you want to be in line with NFPA, is "Remote Supervising Station".
This change was made in the Standard Commercial Fire Alarm Agreement because a supervising station that meets the standard of UL 827 [Standard for Central Station Alarm Services] may perform "central station services" which requires more stringent standards than remote station monitoring. One distinction between these two is that central station service is required to be controlled and operated by an entity that is contracted for installation, inspection, testing, maintenance and runner service. Conversely, remote monitoring service puts this on us on the system owner and does not require runner service.
Of course if you are providing all the services perhaps you should be referred to as the "Central station", but that is not the case for most if not all third party monitoring companies who monitor for dealers.