This template is part of the service credit adjudication guide. Fill the blank note in one call with the commercial operations head, then check it against the completed Illustrative note below.
Fill-in note: nine fields, metadata only
| Field | Ask the sponsor | Write |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Company | "What do you sell, to whom, and how many full-time staff at peak?" | [Product; customer segment; headcount] |
| 2. Credit process | "How do you decide whether an outage earns a credit?" | [By tier and SLA version; claim-driven or proactive] |
| 3. Record classes | "Which records does a decision leave behind?" | [Status incidents, incident reviews, SLA versions, claims, approvals, credit notes] |
| 4. Systems | "Where does each record sit?" | [Status platform; helpdesk; billing; contract repository; email] |
| 5. Coverage | "How many years in each system, and since when are SLA versions dated?" | [Years per system] |
| 6. Volume | "Roughly how many credit notes a year, from a report you already run?" | [Count; claims refused if known] |
| 7. Unresolved question | "What can nobody answer yet about this history?" | [One sentence] |
| 8. Who can authorize | "Who would decide whether to explore licensing?" | [Named roles: signer and counsel] |
| 9. Not included | (fixed) | No customer names, invoices, tickets, worksheets or exports |
Fields 1 to 8 change for every company. Field 9 never does.
Completed example: a fictional analytics platform (Illustrative)
Invented for this page; no real company is described.
- 1. Company: B2B product analytics software sold to mid-market and enterprise customers; 320 full-time staff at peak.
- 2. Credit process: Enterprise and Business tiers carry SLAs with credit tables; credits are claim-driven, with occasional proactive credits after major incidents.
- 3. Record classes: Status incidents, written incident reviews since 2021, four SLA versions, claim tickets, approval replies, credit notes.
- 4. Systems: Status platform; helpdesk; billing system; contract repository; email for some approvals before 2022.
- 5. Coverage: Status history and billing about six years; incident reviews about four; SLA versions dated from 2020.
- 6. Volume: About 90 credit notes a year, counted from the billing team's monthly report; refused claims not counted yet.
- 7. Unresolved question: How affected accounts were identified when a partial outage hit only one tier or region before written incident reviews began.
- 8. Who can authorize: CEO, with general counsel on enterprise contract terms; commercial operations head as sponsor.
- 9. Not included: No customer names, invoices, tickets, worksheets or exports.
Read as the CEO would, the note says what exists, how far back, roughly how much, what is uncertain and who decides. None of it is a record.
Field notes: getting accurate answers without opening billing
Field 2. Whether credits are claim-driven changes what the history contains. Many SLAs require the customer to ask: AWS's compute SLA, for instance, sets a request deadline at the end of the second billing cycle after the incident and applies credits only against future payments. Claim-driven companies hold refusals; proactive ones hold internal decisions about who to credit.
AWSField 5. Ask separately about SLA versions. A credit can only be explained against the terms in force at the time, so the year dated versions begin is often the real start of usable coverage.
Field 6. A count from an existing report is enough. Nobody should run a new export for the note.
Field 7. The best open questions concern joins. A status component in partial outage is, in Statuspage's definition, completely broken for a subset of customers, but which subset is recorded elsewhere, if at all. Another common one: whether credit notes carry a ticket reference. Stripe's credit note object holds the related invoice ID plus a memo and a metadata map, so a reference can travel with the credit, but only if billing staff entered one. The system map for these records lists the joins to ask about.
Statuspage
StripeField 8. If you are unsure who signs, walk the approval tree with the sponsor first.
What the CEO will ask next, and the honest answers
| CEO question | Honest answer at this stage |
|---|---|
| "What would we be paid?" | Unknown until SourceX reviews the records, rights and demand; nobody can quote now |
| "Do customers have to agree?" | Not for a first call; rights review later decides what customer terms allow |
| "Does anything leave the building now?" | No. The first conversation is about metadata only |
| "Who does the work?" | SourceX manages the agreement, rights review, data preparation, delivery and payout |
| "Is this worth an hour?" | That is the CEO's call; the note exists so it can be made quickly |
The SaaS customer data and AI training rights page answers the contract questions in more depth, and the screening worksheet for software and SaaS businesses helps check fit before you draft.
From brief to application
If the CEO takes the call, the company applies and SourceX reviews record classes, rights and qualification. SourceX licenses approved business data directly from companies for AI training and evaluation. Whether enterprise agreements limit reuse, what must be de-identified, current demand and any offer all stay open until that review.
The company needs 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded), a documented operating history, rights to license and an authorized contact. Companies in the U.S., Canada and the EU qualify, as do companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, South Africa, Latin America, the UAE and Saudi Arabia when at least 90% of the data is in English. Partners sign the Channel Partner Agreement before submitting; the first valid introduction within the 90-day window is credited when the company submits a verified application. The client opportunity brief generator can format the fields as an email, and the fractional CEO guide for SaaS companies covers how a finance relationship usually opens this conversation. More SaaS workflows are on the software and SaaS page.
Next step
Refer a company. Earn up to $100,000. Default reward: 25% of Actual Supplier Payout, capped at $100,000 cumulatively per referred company. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
When fields 1 to 8 are confirmed by the sponsor and field 9 holds, register as a partner, check the company against who qualifies and read the program terms before the note goes to the CEO.