Why templates omit this
A standard services contract covers subject, timing, price, acceptance and liability for quality. All correct and necessary.
What it does not cover: what happens to access, accounts and work product once the engagement ends. Templates were written for work with a physical result — built it, handed it over, parted ways. In digital services the result lives inside accounts, and the accounts are exactly what goes undescribed.
The consequence is predictable. While things go well nobody asks. When the engagement ends, especially badly, the subject of the dispute turns out to be absent from the document entirely.
Seven clauses worth writing in
1. Who owns the ad account. The Google Ads or Meta account should be created under your legal entity, with the agency granted access — not the other way round. If the account is theirs, a breakup costs you campaign history, accumulated audiences and years of algorithm learning. Campaigns restarted from zero cost more, which is a budget loss rather than a theoretical one.
2. Who owns analytics. Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager. Same logic: the property is yours, the access is theirs. Historical data does not move between accounts.
3. Domain and DNS. Registered to you. Obvious until it turns out the provider registered it "to be quicker" and the contact on it is theirs.
4. Repository and rights to the code. Code belongs in your repository from day one, not delivered as an archive at the end. Separately, write in the transfer of intellectual property rights — without that explicit clause the rights can remain with the author, and you cannot legally have another team continue the work.
5. Store developer accounts. The App Store and Google Play are their own story. An app published under the provider's account effectively belongs to the provider: you can neither update nor move it without them. Transfer is possible, but it is a procedure, not a button.
6. Third-party services and subscriptions. CRM, hosting, mail, payment gateways. In whose name, paid by whom. A subscription held by the provider means the service stops at the breakup.
7. Handover procedure on termination. A period, a list and a format. Not "the provider hands over access", but specifically: within how many days, which accounts, documentation in what form, who confirms the handover is complete.
What their absence costs
There is rarely a direct loss — there is a cost of recovery.
A lost ad account means a new one with no history. A lost repository means auditing someone else's code and usually rewriting it. An app under someone else's account means either negotiation or republishing and losing every review and install.
Each of those is measured in months of work rather than hours of legal time. And all seven clauses go into a contract in an evening.
It is the same idea we put into our provider scoring: the question is not what the work costs, but what it costs to leave.
Getting them in without derailing the deal
These clauses rarely meet resistance from a sound provider. When they do, that is information in itself.
Raise them before signature. Once work starts your position is weaker and some accounts already exist in the wrong name.
Frame them as a setup step, not as distrust. "We create the accounts, you get access" is a working order of operations, not an accusation.
Verify in fact, not on paper. A month in, open each account's settings and look at the owner. The contract may say one thing while reality shows another, and fixing it in month one is cheap.
Do not demand owner-level access to the provider's internal tools. Their project management, their software licences — not yours, and pressing there is out of place.
Our position: a provider refusing to create the ad account under the client's name, citing convenience, is sufficient reason not to start. The convenience runs one way. The objection applies to very small one-off work — standing up separate infrastructure for a week-long banner campaign genuinely is not worth it.