Terms of service
These terms apply to every order placed with CertBack. By placing an order you accept them on behalf of your business. They are written for business customers; CertBack does not supply consumers.
1. Who we are
1.1 CertBack is a trading name of Joe Blakeley, trading as Joe Blakeley Electrical Services, of 23 The Grove, Linton, Cambridge CB21 4UQ. VAT registration number [number]. Contact: orders@certback.co.uk, 07700 900000.
1.2 “We”, “us” and “our” mean CertBack. “You” and “your” mean the business placing the order, and the individual who inspected or installed the work and who will sign the certificate.
2. What the service is, and is not
2.1 We prepare electrical certificates and related documents (Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificates, Electrical Installation Certificates, Electrical Installation Condition Reports, remedial quotations and covering letters) from inspection and test results, observations and other information that you supply.
2.2 We are a document preparation service. We do not inspect, test, design or construct electrical installations. We do not verify your results. We do not decide observation codes or the overall assessment. We do not sign, issue or certify anything.
2.3 Every document we supply is a draft, delivered unsigned, for you to check, correct if needed, and sign. It carries the statement: “Prepared by CertBack from results and observations supplied by the signatory, who remains solely responsible for the content of this certificate.” You may not remove that statement.
2.4 Nothing we supply is a certificate until you have checked it, are satisfied that it records your inspection and testing accurately, and have signed it. Until then it has no status under BS 7671 or any other standard.
3. Your responsibilities
3.1 You confirm that you are competent and, where required, qualified to carry out the inspection, testing or installation work described, and that the results, observations and codes you send us are your own and are accurate.
3.2 You are solely responsible for the content of any certificate you sign, including anything we typed from your information. Checking the draft before signing is your responsibility, not ours.
3.3 You are solely responsible for compliance with the rules of any competent person scheme or registration body you belong to, including whether certificates must be issued on the scheme's own forms or through its online system, and how notifiable work is registered. We cannot access a scheme portal on your behalf and we take no part in notification.
3.4 You confirm that you have the right to send us the names, addresses and other personal information contained in your order, and that you are the data controller for that information.
3.5 You will not send us results you know to be invented, altered or copied from another report. If we believe results have been invented or altered we may decline the order and any future orders.
4. Ordering and what you must send
4.1 An order is placed when you send us the information for a certificate by WhatsApp, email or any other channel we offer, together with the certificate type you want and any add-ons.
4.2 Each order must include everything listed in our current submission pack for that certificate type. As a minimum: the client and installation address, the supply characteristics, the test results for every circuit (photographed or dictated in the order our submission pack sets out), your observations and codes, the extent and limitations of the inspection, and the dates.
4.3 If an order is incomplete we will tell you what is missing and hold the order. Turnaround runs from the time the order is complete, not from the time it was first sent. We do not guess at missing values and we do not invent results.
4.4 Before your first order you will complete our onboarding form (trading name, address, scheme and registration number, logo, signatory). We rely on it being accurate and current; tell us when anything changes.
5. Turnaround
5.1 Standard turnaround: a complete order received by 6pm on a working day is delivered by 6pm on the next working day. Working days are Monday to Friday excluding English bank holidays.
5.2 Same-day turnaround (where ordered and paid for): a complete order received by 1pm on a working day is delivered by 6pm the same day.
5.3 Turnaround times are targets we work to, not guarantees. If we miss a same-day deadline we refund the same-day surcharge. If we miss a standard deadline by more than one working day we refund the order. That is the limit of our liability for delay.
5.4 We may cap the number of orders we accept in a week. If we cannot accept an order we will tell you straight away.
6. Prices and payment
6.1 Prices are those shown on our website or quoted to you in writing at the time you order. They include VAT at the standard rate, shown separately on our invoice.
6.2 New customers pay in full by card link when the order is placed. Work does not start until payment has cleared.
6.3 Account customers (agreed in writing) receive one invoice a month, payable within 14 days. We may suspend the account if an invoice is more than 14 days overdue and charge statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.
6.4 Multi-board, commercial and unusual jobs are quoted individually before we start. The quote is fixed once you accept it, unless the order turns out to differ materially from what you described.
7. Delivery, checking and corrections
7.1 We deliver by email as a PDF, with a short note listing anything we flagged under clause 8.
7.2 You must check the draft against your own records before signing or sending it to anyone. If you find an error in our typing, tell us within 7 days and we will correct it free of charge, usually the same working day.
7.3 Changes to results, observations, codes or other information that you supplied are not corrections. We will make them as a new order at half the standard price.
7.4 After 7 days without a request for correction, the order is accepted as delivered.
8. Our courtesy check
8.1 When preparing your document we may notice something that looks inconsistent: a measured value above the maximum for the stated protective device, a missing test on a circuit, an observation code that does not match the overall assessment, or a date that does not make sense. Where we notice such things we will list them in the delivery note.
8.2 This is a courtesy, not a review, inspection, audit or verification. We do not check every value, we do not check your results against the installation, and we have no duty to find anything. The absence of a flag does not mean a document is correct.
8.3 Whether to act on a flag is entirely your decision. We do not advise on what code an observation should carry, whether an installation is satisfactory, or whether work complies with BS 7671 or any other standard.
9. Liability
9.1 Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
9.2 Subject to 9.1, our total liability to you for any order, however arising, is limited to the price you paid for that order.
9.3 Subject to 9.1, we are not liable for any loss arising from the content of a certificate you have signed, from your reliance on a document you did not check, from results or information you supplied, from your scheme's rules, or from any use of our documents by you or by your clients. We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of a contract, fines, penalties, or any indirect or consequential loss.
9.4 You will indemnify us against any claim by your client, your scheme, a regulator or any other third party that arises from a certificate you signed, except to the extent the claim is caused by a typing error we made that you could not reasonably have noticed before signing.
9.5 We carry professional indemnity insurance for document preparation. Details are available on request.
10. Data protection and confidentiality
10.1 You are the data controller for the personal information in your orders (your clients' names, addresses and contact details). We process it only to prepare and deliver your documents, as your processor, on your instructions, under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
10.2 We store your orders and the documents we prepare in a dedicated, access-controlled cloud folder for 12 months after delivery, then delete them, unless you ask us in writing to keep them longer or delete them sooner. We keep the order register (date, customer, certificate type, serial number, price) for six years for tax purposes.
10.3 We do not share your orders or documents with anyone except service providers we use to run the business (cloud storage, payment processing, AI-assisted document preparation), each of whom is bound by their own data protection terms. We never send your documents to your clients or to anyone else on your behalf.
10.4 We keep your business information, your pricing and your clients' details confidential. You keep confidential our templates, profiles, processes and prices for account customers.
10.5 Our privacy notice gives the full detail, including how to contact us about personal data. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference [number].
11. Intellectual property
11.1 The documents we prepare for you are yours to use in your business once paid for. You may add your signature, issue them to your clients and keep them as records.
11.2 Our templates, layouts, profiles, prompts, checklists and processes remain ours. You may not copy them, reverse-engineer them or use them to provide a similar service.
11.3 Certificate layouts are based on the model forms in BS 7671, which are the copyright of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and are used in connection with your electrical contracting business under the IET's published terms. We do not reproduce the IET logo.
11.4 Your logo, trading name and scheme marks remain yours. By sending them to us you license us to place them on the documents we prepare for you, and nothing else. You are responsible for being entitled to use any scheme mark you send us.
12. Cancellation and refunds
12.1 You may cancel an order at no charge at any time before we start work on it. Once work has started the order is payable in full.
12.2 If we cannot complete an order (for example because the information is incomplete and you cannot supply the rest), we will refund any payment for that order less a £10 administration charge if we have already spent time on it.
12.3 We may decline any order, and may stop supplying any customer, at any time, with a refund of anything paid for work not done. We will do this in particular where clause 3.5 applies or where a customer is abusive to our staff.
12.4 Account arrangements may be ended by either side on 30 days' written notice. Orders already placed are completed and invoiced under these terms.
13. General
13.1 These terms, our price list and our submission pack form the whole agreement between us for each order. Anything said in a message or call that is not written into them does not form part of the agreement.
13.2 We may change these terms by publishing a new version on our website. The version in force when you place an order applies to that order.
13.3 If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
13.4 Neither of us is liable for failure to perform caused by events outside our reasonable control, including loss of internet or cloud services, provided we tell you promptly and resume as soon as we can.
13.5 These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales and any dispute goes to the courts of England and Wales.