Chapter 5Handbook

The minimum you can hold us to

Our commitments, and what happens when we miss them

The previous chapter is a standard we hold you to. This one is the standard you hold us to. It would be a bit rich to publish one without the other.

We would rather publish targets we are actually measuring than numbers that sound good in a brochure. Everything below is in your agreement, and we report against it on a schedule you can check.

What we commit to

When we are on

7:00am to 5:00pm AEST, Monday to Friday.

Site starts early, so we do too. Most providers open at 8:30, which is two hours after your estimator has already hit a problem.

Outside those hours we respond to critical issues only, through an escalation path that is written down and handed to you at onboarding. We are not going to tell you we are a 24/7 operation. We are a small team and you would find out the first time you tested it.

What the words mean

Response means a person has picked it up and contacted you. Not an automated email confirming a robot received your email.

Restoration means you are working again, including via a workaround. If we get you moving another way, the clock stops there and the underlying fix continues separately.

The response and restoration clocks run during coverage hours, except for P1, where they run around the clock.

The targets

PriorityWhat it means in your businessResponseRestoration target
P1 CriticalNobody can work. Server or tenant down, active security incident, ransomware, a site office offline mid-pour30 minutes4 hours
P2 HighOne function has stopped. Estimating cannot quote, accounts cannot run payroll or issue progress claims, a site cannot reach the drawings2 business hours1 business day
P3 MediumOne person is blocked and there is a workaround4 business hours3 business days
P4 LowNew user, access change, minor fault, scheduled work1 business day5 business days

We assign the priority based on the impact you describe. If you think we have called it wrong, say so and we will move it. You know what stops your business better than we do.

What happens when we miss

Every miss appears in your monthly report with the reason, whether or not you noticed it. That part is not optional and it is not conditional on you asking.

On top of that, missed response targets earn an automatic credit against the following month's invoice.

Missed responseCredit
P15% of that month's managed services fee
P22% of that month's managed services fee
P3 and P4Reported, no credit

Capped at 20% of the monthly fee in any one month. Applied automatically. You do not have to claim it, chase it, or know it happened. We work it out and it appears on the invoice.

Why credits are on response and not restoration. Response is entirely ours. Restoration often is not. If Microsoft has an outage, or a switch has to come from Sydney, we can be doing everything right and still miss the target. Attaching your money to something we do not control would mean writing an exclusion list long enough to make the whole commitment meaningless. So we commit hard on the part that is ours, and we tell you the truth about the rest.

The four exclusions

Every service agreement has exclusions. Most providers bury a page of them. Here are ours, and there are four.

  • Non-critical issues raised outside coverage hours. The clock starts at 7:00am the next business day.
  • Time we spend waiting on you. Access, an approval, a decision, or someone being available. We will tell you when the clock is paused and why.
  • Third-party outages. Microsoft, your carrier, your ISP, or a vendor's own platform going down. Still reported, still worked, no credit.
  • A risk we raised in writing that you chose not to act on. If it is in a previous report and it caused the incident, that one is not on us. It will still be in the report.

That is the list. If we ever want to add a fifth, it goes in the changelog with the date.

How you see it

Everything below is in your agreement. We report against it monthly, including the months we miss.

  • Tickets raised and closed, by priority
  • How we tracked against the targets above, including every miss and its reason
  • Any credits applied, and the arithmetic
  • Patch compliance across your fleet
  • Backup restore test results, with dates
  • Open risks, and what we are doing about each

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming 99.9% uptime, because most of what determines your uptime is not ours to control and a number like that in a handbook is decoration.

We are not claiming a retention rate, because CRADAL was founded in April 2025 and any figure we published would be a rounding error dressed as a track record.

When we have numbers worth publishing, they will appear here with the date they start from.