...Terms and Conditions

All our proposals are prepared in accordance with the Institute of Management Consultants Code of Practice and try to set out the applicable charges, conditions and limitations. Here, however, are a few of our key notes.

• Our proposal will specify the objective to be achieved or charge per time made available. Records of time made available can be provided on request, but invoicing will be triggered once the objective has been acheived or time provided.
• If we provide draft materials for you, they are examples to illustrate the training points made and are for you to review and accept. We will always assist with required alterations, but cannot be responsible for their suitability for your business, hence you accept that we cannot warranty (or be liable for) their sufficiency or effectiveness in use.
• We license to you to use any draft materials supplied within your business once our invoice has been settled in full. License is granted until this point for you to review and assess this draft content within your business only - you are specifically not licensed to show them to an auditor, customer, certification body or other third party until payment has been made. This restriction applies to the content of material (even if edited or repackaged) not the specific presentation we provided.
• We are UK VAT registered - we always quote excluding VAT (as it can be reclaimed for the vast majority of customers) but will charge the applicable rate on the day of invoicing. Payment will be by bank transfer to our nominated account within 30 days of our invoice date unless otherwise agreed. EU VAT sales or other arrangements must be agreed in advance.
• We will specify if travel is included or to be charged (at cost / HMRC not-for-profit mileage rates). For overseas or extensive travel, we may have to charge for time lost travelling but will minimise this. Where an overnight stay is required due to your requirements (such as attending an overseas office) accomodation and subsistence expenses will also be recharged at cost - this is always by agreement.
• Some items (such as copies of a standard if you require one) may be recharged (this will be highlighted in our proposal if they are known in advance).
• Where we recharge an expense 'at cost' this may include the input VAT where we cannot be certain to recover this. For minor expenses (e.g. providing lunch for an external auditor) we operate a minimum charging amount of £20 for administrative simplicity.

...the Photos on the site

Images on the site come from two sources: either 123RF stock photography purchased by HCS Management Consultants with a royalty free license for use or Photography taken by our own personnel, with license granted for use on this site only.

Our own photos have all been taken in a public location where we believe no individual would have an expectation of privacy - if you feature in any of the images and feel to the contrary then please contact us.

Photos and descriptions are provided to illustrate concepts. They in no way imply any endorsement of our services by featured organisations, individuals, venues, places, objects or animals. Though, in general, images tend to be taken in places we happily endorse and we encourage you to visit them.

Where photos are taken in a private location (such as a museum), no money has been paid to the photographer for this purpose and the photographer is using images only for the purpose of promoting their own (non-photography) services. We therefore understand these not to meet the definition of commercial photography as per any admission policy. We have endeavoured to highlight and promote locations where images were captured - if (as a venue) you do not consider this to have been a correct interpretation of your policies or would prefer us to change the wording of any attribution, then please contact us promptly - images and references will be removed or changed on request.

Please do not reuse our photographs. We will seek to recover charges for images used without permission - either for the photographer or venue - at full commercial charging rates.

...the giants whose shoulders you stand on

This site makes use of a few excellent toolkits and services, including:

• Foundation 5: The Zurb Foundation Project project provides an excellent set of scaffolding and utilities for web design.
• Contentful: Contentful's CMS-as-a-service allows you to host your content database with them and provides a really easy way to manage large amounts of information. We'll get to that scale eventually!
• Google Fonts: We know they don't really do it as a charity, but thanks for the open source fonts we have used here: the site should be set in the Asap family.
• Google Analytics: Please see our cookies information below for details about how we try to track and understand visitors to improve your exprience.
• jQuery: Ubiquitous though it is, we have to mention this library that makes javascript simple.
• 123RF: Providers of some stock images for the site (see Photos for more details). Please note that whether these or ours, all images on this site are subject to copyright and may not be reused.
• The Open Source Communities: Without Open Source the hosting of this site couldn't be anywhere near as efficient, effective or secure - however in line with best practice we are not going to tell you which web server or OS...

...privacy and the use of cookies on the site

We use cookies on this site for two reasons:

• Firstly, we use a series of cookies to allow us to use the google analytics system to analyse web visitors. We do this to understand how people find us, which make contact and turn into clients and what information people were or were not able to find. This tracking is anonymous (it doesn't identify individuals) but may have an affect on the advertising Google provides to you: that's why they provide so much to us all for free... You can read all the gory details within the Google Developer documentation.
• Secondly, the EU requires you to have consented to this tracking technology and accepted the implications of this polcy. We therefore (ironically) use a simple cookie to confirm if you have previously accepted our cookie policy and not bother you again.

If you choose to contact us via the webform or clicking a telephone or mailto link then this tracking may allow us to link your history visiting the site to your identity - this will not be used to modify our response to you (the services we offer or pricing) or complete any automated decision making. While you visit the site, we may use automated decision making to vary the content we display or the priority we give to certain content based on you have shown an interest into. This will not be used to make any content inaccessible or change the commercial offer.