Commercial Marine Services Editing and Proofreading Services

A workboat charter agreement quotes a day rate and lists "standby time billed as per standard terms." The vessel sits waiting for four hours while a client's crew resolves an onshore permitting delay, and the invoice that follows charges the full day rate for standby, which the client believed meant something closer to half rate, because "standard terms" was never actually defined anywhere either party can point to, and the two sides walk into the dispute with entirely different ideas about what they agreed to.

We edit what commercial marine operators produce to define the scope and billing of a charter or towage job — workboat and towage charter agreements, standby and waiting time billing terms, scope of work and job completion documentation, survey and condition reports for chartered vessels, and the correspondence resolving a billing dispute after a job. Our editors work on the agreement that has to define what happens during the hours a vessel is not actually doing the work it was chartered for.

The specifically defined billing term is what a charter agreement actually needs before a job starts, and its failure is a phrase like standard terms that refers to an understanding neither party has actually written down anywhere. Billed as per standard terms is not a term; it is a placeholder for a definition that was never supplied, and two parties can each believe in good faith that their own understanding is the standard one. We work through these so standby and waiting time are defined with an actual rate and the specific conditions that trigger it, since "standby billed as per standard terms" leaves entirely open whether that means the full day rate, a reduced rate, or something else, and a client who assumed one has no basis to dispute an invoice charging another; so the scope of work is stated specifically enough to determine what falls inside it versus what constitutes an additional or standby charge, given that a vague scope makes every delay arguable regardless of what the billing terms actually say; so any charge that will apply beyond the base day rate — standby, weather delay, mobilisation and demobilisation — is listed individually with its own rate and trigger, rather than bundled into a general reference to additional charges that may apply; so a job completion record states what was actually done, including any time spent on standby with the reason, given that an invoice with no supporting record of what happened during the billed hours is simply an assertion; so a dispute over an invoice is resolved by reference to the specific rate and trigger defined in the agreement, rather than each party's account of what standard terms usually means; and so a survey or condition report accompanying a charter states its scope and findings specifically, as a vessel condition dispute suffers from exactly the same vagueness problem as a billing dispute when terms are undefined. Agreements written this way settle what a job costs before the invoice arrives, not after.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including charter terms, billing records and dispute correspondence. We are editors rather than marine surveyors, charter brokers or maritime law specialists, and we offer no view on charter terms, billing determinations or dispute resolution. What we can do is make sure a term like standard rests on an actual definition.