License a named way of working for the job in front of you.
You own the machines and you have work to do. What you take from us is a named way of working, licensed for your own machine, for the hours it actually runs. Not a seat. Not a subscription. Not a term you have to fill.
One skill, or a set. The choice is commercial, and it is yours.
Two products, one mechanism underneath. What changes between them is the paper, not how anything runs or how anything is counted.
One name, one family of machine
One named person's way of running one family of machine. You take a skill when the work in front of you is one kind of work — the trenching, the fine grade, the slope, the loading — and you want that kind of work done a particular way.
It is chosen by name before the work starts, metered by the hour it runs, and attributed to the person it came from. A skill.
Several names under one paper
Several named skills licensed together on one agreement. You take a set when a job needs more than one kind of work, or when you want a shelf to draw from across a season rather than a separate negotiation each time a job changes shape.
Each member is still chosen by name, still metered separately, still attributed separately. Sets and series.
A set is a shelf, not a stew.
Licensing several skills together never merges them. Each member stays separately named, separately selectable, separately counted and separately endable. We do not license a blend, and a set is not one. What a set changes is the commercial arrangement: one paper instead of several, one relationship to manage, one invoice at the end of the month. What it does not change is anything at the machine. A crew still chooses one name before the work starts, that name still runs on its own, and if the person behind one member ends theirs, the rest of the shelf carries on exactly as it was.
The hours a licensed skill actually ran on your machine. No others.
The act that clears a machine to run is the act that starts the meter. Clearance and invoice come off one signed row, signed at the machine, so neither can be adjusted without the other.
That single fact settles most of what a purchasing department wants to know. There is no separate usage report to reconcile against a separate entitlement, because there is one row and it does both jobs. An hour on your invoice is an hour a named way of working ran on a machine you own, cleared by a person on your crew.
What is counted
- The hours a licensed skill ran on your machine, per skill, by name.
- Each member of a set counted on its own, against its own name.
- Every hour written where the work happened, and signed there.
What is not
- A seat, a head count, or a machine that sat in the yard.
- A subscription that runs whether a machine runs or not, or a minimum term you have to fill.
- The hours your own operators worked their own way. That is not ours, and we do not count it.
The rate is set by the licence. No page on this site quotes one, and nobody should quote you one before they know what you run and what you run it on. What the site does state is what a rate is charged against: the hour a machine ran under a named way of working, cleared by a person, recorded on one signed row. The licence sets out the grant, the term and the end.
Several skills, several meters, one invoice.
A job that needs three kinds of work is three choices, three meters and three signed rows. What arrives at the end of the month is one invoice built from them, itemized by name — never one blended charge you cannot take apart.
Fig. 1 — A job, several names, one invoice. Sealed objects carry a mark; dashed rules mark what stays separate.
Your machine stays your machine.
Nothing of ours drives it, nothing of ours sits inside its safety system, and nothing of ours takes a decision that system is entitled to take. A licensed way of working proposes. A person on your crew authorizes. Safety has veto.
Every hour you are invoiced for, against the rows signed on your own machines.
You hold the machines the rows were signed on. That is the whole reason the count is checkable at source rather than through a report we write about ourselves.
A second party — you, or somebody you appoint — can check four things without asking our permission and without taking our word for any of them: that a signed row exists for each hour on the invoice; that the name on the row is the name your crew chose; that the hours billed are the hours on the rows; and that no row was altered after it was signed.
This page exists because of a gap in the closest thing to a precedent. The one deployed scheme that pays named contributors per use leaves a contributor able to see that they were paid, and unable to see whether they were paid correctly. A count nobody outside the payer can check is a number, not a count. The mechanism, and what each side can check against the other, is on audit.
A person can stop, and you should know that before you sign, not after.
It is on this page rather than in a schedule, because it changes what a licence is worth.
Every way of working is held under a licence the person it came from can end. Freely, on their own say, effective on receipt, needing nobody's agreement — not ours and not yours. When one ends, the timing is ruled and exact, and neither we nor you can extend it. The skill stops for new work at once: no new job starts under it from the day the notice arrives. A job already running finishes, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard. Then the machine goes back to its own operator's way of working.
You get no claim of any kind. A withdrawal is never a breach by us and never a failure of supply. It is the mechanism working the way it is described here, and the whole architecture is only honourable because that is true. A person whose way of working could be taken from them by a commercial arrangement they never signed would not have a right at all. They would have a courtesy.
What you can do about it is plan for it. A set gives you more than one name for a kind of work, so a shelf survives a member leaving it. Your own crew's way of working is underneath the whole time and never left. And you are told two dates and never one: the out-of-service date, the day a skill stops being choosable, and the true date, the day the last copy is gone with the backups. The shorter is never allowed to stand in for the longer. The full timing is on withdrawal.
Nothing here replaces the person in the seat, and nothing here scores them.
A count line records that a named way of working ran, on a machine, for a number of hours. It is a meter reading. It is not an assessment of anybody, it is not built to become one, and it is not supplied as one. A record is never supplied to assess the person, to an insurer or to anyone else. That rule holds for the people whose work is in the registry and it holds for your crew, who are not in it.
Nor do we reach into your employment relationships. We never contract with the person in the seat. The people whose ways of working are held in the registry signed with Even Steven — in their own seat, on their own machine, on their own time, not with their employer and not with us. Your crew's terms are between you and them, and a licence from us touches none of it.
What your operators keep is the part that matters on a site: the machine still does what the person working it decides it will do. A licensed way of working is a named way of doing a piece of work that a person chooses to use, before the work starts, and can decline to use. It is a tool on the shelf with somebody's name on it, not a supervisor.
Work in front of you that needs a way of working you can name?
Tell us what your fleet runs and what the job is. The licence sets the rate.