Make an agreement flexible

Including a standard extension period in a cooperation agreement makes contracts flexible. In this way, much artifice can be avoided.

Clients like to have agreements effective January 1. This is often linked to fiscal years, budgets and budgets. As a result, November and December are enormously busy with expiring tender procedures, clarifications of award decisions and sometimes objections and summary proceedings. Sometimes the existing contract has already been terminated but a new one cannot yet be concluded. This is not a problem for some contracts, as a client can do without a framework agreement for acoustic services for a few weeks, but not for building maintenance contracts, for example. With artifice the interim period is bridged and at a later stage the contracting authority will have to convince the accountant that he has acted correctly.

The solution is simple and I advise every contracting authority to include it in agreements. Are you not a contracting authority but a contractor? Then bring the solution to the attention of your client. He will be grateful to you. The solution is as follows. The agreement specifies the term. That is the initial term. Often an extension is also stipulated. That is the extended term. Include a provision in the agreement that the client can extend the agreement, after the initial term or after the extended term if this has already been used, a maximum of four times.
to the extended term if this has already been used, a maximum of four times with a term of three months each time.

What does this mean in practice? The client notices that the current contract (extended or not) is about to expire and that it seems that a subsequent contract cannot be concluded in time. He then invokes the first extension option of, say, three months. If it appears that it will still not be possible to conclude a subsequent contract during that period, the client invokes the second extension option of, say, another three months. Or shorter based on the estimate of how long it will take until the new agreement is concluded. An agreement then has, for example, an initial term of four years, the possibility of (regular) extension of once two years and four throaty possibility of short extensions of up to three months each time. In a concrete case, for example, the term becomes four years plus three months plus two months. Flexibility and clear, concrete extension options are the key words.