Why we ask for half on order and half before the hardware ships

Payment terms usually arrive as a line of small print at the foot of a quotation, and most people only read them closely when something has already gone wrong. We would rather explain ours at the start, because the reasons behind them show exactly what your money is doing at each stage and who stands behind what once the system is in the walls. There are two payments of half each, an optional design retainer that is credited in full, and a clear line between our warranty and your installer's.

You can see the design before you commit to hardware

Before you commit to anything, we take two rooms of your villa to full depth, so that you can see how the design thinks: which devices go where, why each one is there and what each line costs. If you would like to see the whole villa at that depth before placing a hardware order, there is a design retainer of AED 3,500 per villa, including VAT, which opens the complete engineering for every room without committing you to buy a single part.

If you then go ahead and order, the retainer is credited in full against the hardware, so the design has cost you nothing on top. If you decide not to proceed, you will have paid a fixed and known sum for a complete engineered design, and you will have paid it openly rather than through a margin tucked somewhere inside a hardware price.

The first half pays for work that starts the day you order

The first payment is half of the order, made when you place it. That half is not refundable, and it is worth being clear about why, because it is not a deposit sitting in an account waiting for the hardware to arrive. It pays for three things that begin as soon as you order.

The first is the wiring drawings, the first-fix schedule your contractor builds from, which gives every device its location, mounting height, back box, conduit and cable. The second is the engineering handover, in which the design passes to your installer and project engineer together with the documents they work from: the bus topology, the line loads, the power budget, the group address scheme and the rack layout. The third is the supplier's deposit, which we pay when we place your order. Once the drawings are issued, the handover is done and the deposit is with the supplier, that half has been spent on your villa, and there is nothing left in it that could honestly be handed back.

The timing also matches the way a villa is built. Cable and back boxes go in at first fix, well before any keypad or screen is mounted, so the drawings are needed long before the hardware is.

The second half comes before anything leaves the supplier

The second half is paid before the hardware ships, and the goods never leave the supplier until it has been received. The rule is symmetrical, which is the whole point of it. You are never asked to pay for the entire system before any of it has reached your site, and we are never asked to deliver equipment that has not been paid for, so neither side ends up carrying the other's risk.

It usually suits the site as well. The hardware is needed at second fix, when the walls are finished and the rooms are clean enough for screens, keypads and the rack, and sensitive electronics are better delivered at that point than stored for months in a room the plasterers are still using. It makes sense, therefore, to time the delivery, and with it the second payment, to the moment the site is genuinely ready.

What the order covers, and what the installer invoices

The two payments are each half of our order, which covers the hardware at MSRP and the engineering behind it: the design, the three document sets, the engineer's review and the changes along the way. Wiring, conduit, containment, installation, programming and commissioning belong to the installer's scope and appear on the installer's own invoice, under an agreement you make directly with them.

That separation is deliberate. We never install, program or commission, which means we have no labour to sell and no reason to design more parts into your villa than it needs. It also means that the two invoices describe two different pieces of work, and each can be checked against the scope it covers without the one hiding inside the other.

We warrant the design and the product, and the installer warrants the work

The same line runs through the warranties. Our warranty covers the engineering and the product we supplied. If a keypad fails, that is the product, and it falls to us. If the design left out something it should have included, such as the power supply a large screen needs or the actuator channel a circuit needs, that is the engineering, and it falls to us as well.

The installer's work, from the cable and its terminations to the programming and commissioning, is covered by the installer's own workmanship warranty. It should be agreed in writing before work starts, stating what it covers and for how long, so that nobody has to reconstruct it after a fault has appeared. When both warranties are written down and the boundary between them is clear, every fault has an owner from the moment it is found, and that is a far better position to be in than an argument about whose it is.

What to do next

If you would like to see how this works on your own villa, send us the floor plans and we will take two rooms to full depth before you commit to anything. The pricing page explains how each system is priced and exactly what the bill includes.