Question:
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Ken,
We are a Medipendant dealer. If a customer's family wants to pay for all the activation and the monitoring on an on going basis, who should sign the contract?
Thank you
Cathy
Safe At Home, Inc.
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Answer:
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This question comes up frequently with PERS service. It is also common with builder/purchaser or landlord/ tenant. So the question is, do you get the contract signed by the person who hires you and agrees to pay you, or the person for whom you are providing the service, if different from the one who hires you?
The question presumes of course that you have a contract that needs to get signed, and that's definitely a good start. Making sure you have my Standard PERS Contract is a better start.
You have competing issues. You want the person who hires and agrees to pay you to sign the contract in case you need to enforce it. You want the person to whom you are providing the service to sign the contract so that you can hold that person to the protective provisions in the contract in the event that the alarm system does not do what this end user thinks it should have done.
In short, you should if possible get both persons to sign the contract. You can indicate on the contract that one is responsible for paying and the other is getting the services.
In a PERS situation the "end user" may not be able to sign the contract. In that case the person who hires you needs to be in the legal position of being able to bind the end user to a contract, either as legal guardian, conservator, authorized agent or other indicia of entitlement to sign on behalf of the end user. I would include an adult relative in that category, and the signature should specify that the contract is being signed on behalf of the end user, then again by the party responsible for payment [and that means if it's the same person then that person signs twice, on his own behalf and on behalf of the end user].