Slate — Terms of Service

Version 1.1 · Effective 10/08/2026 ·

These terms are a legal agreement between you and us. Please read them before using Slate. By creating an account or using Slate, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use Slate.

1. Who we are and how to contact us

2. Definitions

Slate — the website at slateone.co.uk and the invoicing and timesheet service provided through it.
You — the person or business that opens an account.
Your Content — everything you put into Slate: invoices, timesheets, client records, business details, bank details, logos and notes.
Recipient — a person or organisation you send an invoice or timesheet to through Slate.
Client Data — personal data about your Recipients and their staff that you enter into or generate in Slate.
"Slate", "we", "us" and "our" means Matthew Smith, a sole trader trading as Slate, contactable at hello@slateone.co.uk.

3. Eligibility and your status

You must be 18 or over to use Slate.

Slate is a business tool. By using it you confirm that you are using it in the course of a business, trade, craft or profession — as a contractor, consultant, freelancer, sole trader or company. You are not a consumer for the purposes of this agreement, and consumer protection legislation does not apply to it.

If you open an account on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm you have authority to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

4. Your account

You are responsible for your account, your password, and everything done through your account. Keep your password confidential and tell us immediately at hello@slateone.co.uk if you think someone else has access to it.

You must give accurate registration information and keep it up to date. You may not share your account, sell it, or let anyone else use it.

We may suspend or close an account that we reasonably believe is being used in breach of these terms, is fraudulent, or is dormant (see clause 15).

5. What Slate is

Slate lets you create, store and send invoices and timesheets, keep records of the businesses you invoice, and see the status of documents you have sent.

6. What Slate is not

This clause matters. Please read it carefully.

Slate does not handle money. There is no payment processing, card processing, direct debit, escrow or payment guarantee. Invoices you create display the bank details you enter, and your Recipients pay you directly by bank transfer. We never hold, transmit or have visibility of your funds, and we are not a payment service provider or a regulated financial institution.

Slate does not chase or collect debts. We are not a collections agency and we take no responsibility for whether, when or how much you are paid.

Slate is not accounting, tax, legal or financial advice. It does not verify that your invoices are correct, that your VAT treatment is right, that your rates or terms comply with your contract, or that your arrangements comply with IR35, the Construction Industry Scheme or any other rules. You are responsible for the accuracy and legality of everything you send.

Slate does not submit anything to HMRC. It is not Making Tax Digital software and does not file returns.

Slate is not your system of record. You remain legally responsible for keeping your own business and tax records for the periods HMRC requires. Export and keep your own copies. See clause 16.

We do not guarantee delivery. We send invoices and timesheets by email through a third-party provider. Corporate mail systems, spam filters and accounts payable portals may block, delay, quarantine or silently discard messages. A "sent" status in Slate means we passed the message to our email provider for delivery — it is not proof that a Recipient received, opened, or accepted the document. Confirming receipt is your responsibility.

7. Sending invoices and timesheets

When you send a document through Slate:

it is emailed to the address you specify, with the reply-to set to your own email address, so replies come to you;
a PDF is attached; and
the email includes a unique link to view the document online. That link is long and unguessable, but it is not password-protected and does not expire. Anyone who obtains it can view that document.

You are responsible for choosing who receives your documents and links, and for the consequences of sending them to the wrong address. We cannot recall a sent email or disable an issued link.

You confirm that you have a lawful basis to send business communications to each Recipient, and that the documents you send relate to genuine work you have carried out or contracted to carry out.

8. Your Content

You own Your Content. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, display and process Your Content, but only to the extent needed to operate, secure, back up and support Slate for you. This licence ends when Your Content is deleted, except for copies retained in backups until they are overwritten.

We do not use Your Content to train machine-learning models, and we do not permit our providers to do so.

You are responsible for Your Content. You confirm you have the right to upload it and that it does not infringe anyone's rights or break the law.

We do not monitor Your Content routinely, but we may remove or disable access to content that we reasonably believe is unlawful, fraudulent, or in breach of clause 9, and we may report unlawful activity to the authorities.

9. Acceptable use

You must not use Slate to:

create, send or store invoices or timesheets that are false, fraudulent, or for work not genuinely carried out or contracted;
invoice for illegal goods or services, or to launder money or evade tax;
send unsolicited bulk email, marketing, or anything unrelated to legitimate invoicing;
impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your identity, business or bank details;
upload malware, or anything unlawful, defamatory, obscene or infringing;
attempt to gain unauthorised access to Slate, other users' data, or our infrastructure; probe, scan or test our security; or circumvent access controls;
scrape, crawl or bulk-extract data from Slate, or use it to build a competing product;
reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive our source code, except as permitted by law;
resell, sublicense or provide Slate to third parties as a service; or
place unreasonable load on our systems, or interfere with other users' use of Slate.

Breach of this clause entitles us (Slate) to suspend or terminate your account immediately and take legal action.

10. Data protection

How we handle your personal data — your account, your business details, your use of Slate — is set out in our Privacy Policy. For that data we are the controller.

For Client Data — the personal data about your Recipients that you put into Slate — you are the controller and we are your processor. Our obligations to you are set out in Schedule 1 (Data Processing Terms), which forms part of this agreement.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis to enter and send Client Data, for telling your Recipients how their data is used where required, and for handling requests they make to you about it.

11. Free access, and future charges

Slate is currently free to use for contractors, with no fees, no card required and no usage charges.

We intend to keep core invoicing and timesheet features free for contractors. We may introduce charges for new or optional features. If we ever decide to charge for a feature you already use, we will give you at least 30 days' written notice, and you may close your account before the change takes effect without charge.

We may charge separately for accounts used by agencies, hiring companies and other organisations. Those accounts will be governed by separate terms.

Because Slate is provided free of charge, we give no service level commitment, and clause 13 limits our liability accordingly.

12. Availability and changes to Slate

We aim to keep Slate available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted, timely, error-free or secure. We may suspend it for maintenance, upgrades, security or technical reasons, with notice where practical and without notice where not.

We may change, add or remove features.

Slate depends on third-party providers — currently Vercel, Supabase and Resend — and on the internet generally. Failures, outages or changes at those providers may affect Slate, and we are not liable for them beyond our own obligations in these terms.

13. Our liability to you

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable for:

loss of profits, revenue, business, contracts, opportunity, anticipated savings or goodwill;
non-payment, late payment or short payment by any Recipient, or any dispute between you and a Recipient;
any invoice or timesheet not being received, opened, accepted or acted on;
errors, omissions or inaccuracies in Your Content, including incorrect bank details;
loss or corruption of data, where you have not kept your own copies;
consequences of a view link being forwarded, intercepted or misused after it leaves our systems;
any indirect or consequential loss; or
failures caused by third-party providers, your own systems, or your internet connection.

Cap. Our total liability to you for all claims connected with Slate or these terms, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you have paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, and (b) £100.

You accept that this allocation of risk is reasonable given that Slate is provided free of charge, and that you retain full control of your invoicing, records and client relationships.

14. Your liability to us

You will indemnify us against all losses, damages, costs and reasonable legal fees we incur arising from: Your Content; your use of Slate; your breach of these terms or of applicable law; and any claim brought against us by a Recipient or third party in connection with documents you created or sent through Slate.

15. Suspension and termination

By you. You may stop using Slate and close your account at any time from your account settings, or by emailing hello@slateone.co.uk.

By us. We may suspend or terminate your account: immediately, if you breach clause 9 or we reasonably suspect fraud or unlawful use; immediately, if required by law; on 30 days' notice, for any other reason, including if we discontinue Slate; or if your account is inactive for [24] months, after we have emailed the address on your account.

On termination: your right to use Slate ends, and Your Content is deleted or irreversibly anonymised within 30 days, in line with our Privacy Policy. Export your records before you close your account. After deletion we cannot recover them. Clauses 6, 8 (as to accrued rights), 13, 14, 16 and 17 to 25 survive termination.

16. Backups and your records

We take backups for our own disaster recovery, on a rolling cycle. They are not a data recovery service for you. We do not guarantee we can restore individual documents you have deleted, and we are not obliged to.

You are responsible for exporting and retaining your own invoicing and timesheet records for as long as HMRC and your own obligations require.

17. Our intellectual property

Slate — including its software, design, branding, the slateone.co.uk domain, and all associated intellectual property — belongs to us or our licensors. These terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use Slate for your own business purposes, and nothing more.

If you send us feedback, suggestions or ideas, you agree we may use them freely, without obligation or payment to you.

18. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change is material we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Slate after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, close your account before they take effect.

The version number and date at the top change with every update.

19. Force majeure

We are not liable for failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including provider outages, internet or telecommunications failures, cyber attacks, power failures, industrial action, fire, flood, epidemic, war, terrorism, or governmental action.

20. Notices

We will send notices to the email address on your account. You should send notices to hello@slateone.co.uk. Email notices are treated as received on the next business day after sending.

21. Assignment

You may not assign or transfer your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may assign or transfer ours — for example if Slate is sold — provided your rights are not materially prejudiced.

22. Third party rights

No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

23. Entire agreement, severance and waiver

These terms, the Privacy Policy and Schedule 1 are the entire agreement between us about Slate, and replace any earlier understanding. You confirm you have not relied on any statement or representation not set out in them — but this does not limit liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.

If any provision is found unlawful or unenforceable, the rest continues in force. A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it.

24. No partnership or agency

Nothing in these terms creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship. We do not act as your agent and have no authority to bind you to any Recipient.

25. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute connected with them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Schedule 1 — Data Processing Terms

These terms apply where we process Client Data on your behalf and satisfy Article 28 UK GDPR.

1. Roles. You are the controller and we are the processor of Client Data. Each of us will comply with UK data protection law.

2. Your instructions. We process Client Data only on your documented instructions, which are: to store it, to generate invoices and timesheets from it, to send those documents to the Recipients you specify, to record delivery status, and to make it available to you in your account. Using Slate as intended constitutes those instructions. We will tell you if we believe an instruction breaches data protection law, and we may process Client Data where required by law, telling you first unless the law prohibits it.

3. Subject matter and duration. Subject matter: providing invoicing and timesheet services. Duration: for as long as your account is open, plus the deletion period in clause 15 of the main terms.

4. Nature and purpose. Collection, storage, organisation, retrieval, transmission by email, and erasure, for the purpose of preparing and sending invoices and timesheets.

5. Categories of data subject. Your Recipients and their staff — typically accounts payable, finance and hiring contacts at the businesses you invoice.

6. Types of personal data. Names, job titles, business email addresses, business postal addresses, telephone numbers, and any personal data you include in document line items or notes. You must not enter special category data or criminal offence data.

7. Confidentiality. Everyone we authorise to process Client Data is bound by confidentiality obligations.

8. Security. We maintain appropriate technical and organisational measures under Article 32 UK GDPR, including encryption in transit and at rest, hashed credentials, row-level security isolating each account's data, restricted administrative access, logging and monitoring, and patch management.

9. Sub-processors. You give general authorisation for us to appoint sub-processors. Our current sub-processors are Vercel (hosting), Supabase (database and authentication) and Resend (email delivery). We impose data protection obligations on each of them equivalent to these terms and remain liable to you for their performance. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before adding or replacing a sub-processor, by email or in the app; if you reasonably object you may close your account before the change takes effect.

10. International transfers. Some sub-processors process data outside the UK. Where they do, we rely on an adequacy decision or on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, supported by an assessment of the destination.

11. Data subject rights. You can access, correct, export and delete Client Data yourself in Slate. If a data subject contacts us directly, we will not respond substantively but will pass the request to you promptly. We will give you reasonable assistance with requests you cannot fulfil yourself, taking into account the nature of the processing.

12. Personal data breach. We will notify you without undue delay after becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting Client Data, with the information reasonably available to us, and assist you with your own notification obligations.

13. DPIAs and audits. We will provide reasonable assistance with data protection impact assessments and prior consultations. We will make available the information reasonably necessary to demonstrate compliance with this Schedule. You may audit no more than once a year, on 30 days' written notice, at your cost, during business hours, and without disrupting the service — except where a supervisory authority requires otherwise or following a breach.

14. Deletion. On termination we delete Client Data within 30 days, except where law requires us to keep it, and except copies in backups until overwritten, which remain subject to these terms.