Software and web development in the UK

The contract, and what your advisers will check

We contract under English law with the courts of England and Wales. Most UK clients ask for it, and agreeing costs us nothing. The agreement is between two companies for a defined deliverable rather than between you and an individual for their time, which is the distinction your accountant will care about more than any technical clause in it.

IR35 does not reach an engagement like this. The off-payroll rules govern individuals supplying their services through an intermediary, and the test turns on whether that worker would look like your employee if you engaged them directly. You are buying a scoped build from a company that carries its own team, its own equipment and its own risk on fixed-price work. We are happy for the contract to say so in terms your advisers can point at, and we would rather they read it before signature than after.

Intellectual property transfers to you on final payment, in writing. Repositories move to your GitHub or Azure DevOps organisation, hosting and domain accounts are registered to your company from the start rather than to us, and there is no licence back to us for anything written for you. Nothing we build leaves you needing our permission to change your own product.

VAT, invoicing, and how the money actually moves

For business-to-business services supplied from outside the UK the reverse charge normally applies: you account for the VAT in your own return rather than paying it to us, and where you are fully recoverable it nets to nothing. Our invoices state that position on the face of the document, so your accounts payable team is not left working it out. We quote a figure excluding VAT rather than one that moves once somebody determines the treatment.

Payment is by bank transfer in pounds. We do not ask clients to pay by card, because international card fees on a five-figure invoice cost a few per cent for nothing. The usual arrangement is 30% on signing, then 30% on design approval, 30% on development complete and 10% at launch, on 14-day terms. The sterling figure is fixed for the project: if the rupee moves against the pound in month three, that is our exposure rather than a change request aimed at you.

If you are partially exempt, or the supply is not straightforwardly business to business, we would rather your accountant confirmed the treatment before the first invoice than reconciled it at year end.

Where your data sits, and which law it answers to

Two regimes apply at once. Your obligations run under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Ours, as the party processing from India, run under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. They are not the same law wearing different names: the Indian act is consent-forward, lighter on the lawful-basis machinery that UK GDPR builds everything around, and has no direct equivalent to legitimate interests.

So we build to the stricter of the two, which is yours. Hosting goes in a region you approve, and for most UK clients that is London or Dublin rather than anywhere near us. Where we process personal data on your behalf we sign a processor agreement setting out what we do with it, how long it is kept and what happens to it on termination. Subject access and erasure are built as product features rather than left as a manual database job for whoever is available on a Friday afternoon.

If you are a public sector body, WCAG 2.2 AA and the accessibility statement the regulations require are scoped from the start rather than priced as an extra at the end. Automated scanning finds roughly a third of real accessibility issues, so the manual screen reader pass is part of the work.

What a week actually looks like

India is five and a half hours ahead of the UK in winter and four and a half once you are on British Summer Time, so a good part of your morning sits inside our working day. In practice a question sent first thing has an answer the same morning rather than the next one. Only our UAE clients get a longer overlap than that, and they are ninety minutes away rather than five and a half hours.

A written update lands at the end of our day, so there is something waiting when you open your laptop. One scheduled call a week in your morning covers whatever genuinely needs a conversation. We do not fill a calendar to look busy, and we do not disappear for a fortnight and then present a finished thing you have no room left to change.

Questions UK clients ask