---
title: A fee agreement that can't reach the invoice isn't an agreement
description: "What a recruitment fee agreement must specify to survive the trip to an invoice: the clause worth more than the percentage, and how to make a fee floor real."
---

[Skip to content](https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement#main-content)

[![echo-recruit-logo-760x180](https://www.echorecruit.com/hs-fs/hubfs/echo-recruit-logo-760x180.png?width=300&height=71&name=echo-recruit-logo-760x180.png)](https://www.echorecruit.com)

Open main navigation

Close main navigation

- [Contact us](https://www.echorecruit.com/contact-us)

[Contact us](https://www.echorecruit.com/contact-us)

[All posts](https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/all)

 September 28, 2026

# A fee agreement that can't reach the invoice isn't an agreement

 By   Echo Recruit  ·   5 minute read

*Most fee disputes are not about the percentage. They are about what the percentage applies to, and that sentence is usually the vaguest one in the document.*

In short

- The basis clause — what the fee is a percentage of — is worth more money than the percentage and gets a tenth of the attention.
- A fee floor enforced by policy is a suggestion. A fee floor enforced by an approval before the document can be sent is a floor.
- Never edit a sent quote. The client still has the version you sent them.
- The agreement should be structured data with a signature on it, not prose somebody has to re-read at invoicing time.

Ask an agency owner what their standard terms are and they will tell you a percentage. Ask what the percentage applies to and there is a pause, because the honest answer is that it depends which template was used and who negotiated it.

That pause is where the money is. A fee agreement is a document whose job is to still be unambiguous eleven months later, in front of a client’s procurement team, when the person who negotiated it has left. Most of them are not written to that standard, and the gap does not show up until it is expensive.

## The clauses that decide what you get paid

### The fee model, named

Contingency percentage, retained across stages, contract markup or margin, or a flat fee per hire. Say which, once, in a way that does not require interpretation. An agreement that describes a retainer in one paragraph and a success fee in another is an agreement you will be arguing about.

### The basis — the clause worth the most

What is the percentage *of*? Base salary only? Base plus guaranteed bonus? Total first-year cash including a sign-on? Does it include a car allowance, a relocation payment, an expected commission at target?

On a $95,000 base with a $20,000 guaranteed bonus, a 20% fee is either $19,000 or $23,000. That is a 21% difference in what you are paid, decided by a sentence most agreements handle with the phrase “the candidate’s remuneration”.

Write it as a list of what is in and what is out. If a client wants base only, that is a perfectly reasonable deal — it is just one you should be pricing knowingly rather than discovering at invoice time.

### The guarantee, in full

Four separate questions, and agreements routinely answer two of them:

- How long is the period, and does it run from the start date or the offer date?
- Is it a **replacement** or a **rebate**? Replacement protects your revenue; a rebate hands it back. Never let the client choose after the fact.
- If it is a rebate, is it full or sliding? A sliding scale by week is fairer to both sides and much harder to argue about, because the arithmetic is in the document.
- What voids it? Redundancy, a change of role, the client failing to pay the invoice on time, a restructure. A guarantee with no exclusions is a guarantee against the client’s own decisions.

### Payment terms, with a start point

“30 days” is half a term. Thirty days from what — the invoice date, the start date, the end of the month in which the invoice was issued? The last of those can add another four weeks and is the one clients’ standard terms quietly assume.

### Currency, and who carries the movement

If the salary is in one currency and you invoice in another, name the rate source and the date it is taken. Otherwise the difference is a discussion, and you will lose it, because the client’s finance team does this more often than you do.

### The awkward scenarios, decided in advance

Counter-offer accepted after resignation. Candidate withdraws before starting. Candidate you introduced is hired eight months later for a different role. Candidate hired into a second role at a sister company. Each of these will happen; each is unpleasant to negotiate in the moment and straightforward to agree in advance, because at signing time neither side knows which way it will cut.

### Who can say yes

Name the roles at the client who can approve an offer and accept a candidate. This costs nothing to include and resolves the specific dispute where a hiring manager engaged you directly and procurement later says they never authorised it.

This is a list of the commercial decisions a fee agreement has to make, not a template and not legal advice. The wording that makes them enforceable depends on your jurisdiction and is worth a lawyer’s afternoon — once, properly, for a document you will use hundreds of times.

## Getting it signed, in a way you can evidence

Two questions get asked about a signature when there is a dispute: did this person agree, and can you show that it was them?

“Yes, see the email thread” is weaker than it feels. A name typed at the bottom of a reply, forwarded through three mailboxes, is evidence of a conversation rather than evidence of an agreement. What you want is a signature bound to the document, timestamped, with some verification that the signer controlled the address it was sent to — a one-time code to that address is cheap and makes a meaningful difference to what you can demonstrate.

And both sides should sign. A document only your client signed is an acceptance of your terms; a document you both signed is an agreement, and it looks like one to everybody who reads it afterwards.

## Make the floor an actual floor

Every desk has a number below which a deal stops being worth doing. Almost every desk enforces it as a policy, communicated in a meeting, remembered unevenly.

A policy is a suggestion under pressure, and fee negotiation is pressure by definition — it happens at the end of a long conversation, with a recruiter who wants the deal, against a procurement person who does this professionally. The floor loses that fight regularly, and the agency finds out at the quarterly review.

The version that works has three parts:

- **The floor is a number in the system**, not in a handbook, and it can differ by fee model and by market.
- **Going below it requires a written reason.** Not to create bureaucracy — to create a record. Six months of those reasons is the most useful pricing document your business will ever produce.
- **It requires an approval before the document can be sent**, not after. An approval sought after the client has the PDF is a rubber stamp with extra steps.

## Never edit a sent quote

When terms change — and they do, usually twice — the tempting thing is to correct the document and resend. Do not.

The client has the first version. If your copy has changed and theirs has not, you now have two documents that both claim to be the agreement, and the only way to tell which is which is a conversation about who has the latest. A revision should be a new, linked version with its own number and its own signature, leaving the original intact and visibly superseded.

The same principle covers the invoice: once a document stops being a draft, both parties’ details, the terms and the numbering should be frozen onto it. An invoice that changes shape because somebody edited the client record afterwards is not a record of anything.

## Then the invoice should assemble itself

Everything above only pays off if the agreed terms actually reach the invoice. If they are prose in a filed PDF, they reach it by way of a person re-reading it under time pressure — which is how a fee gets typed four times and goes out wrong on the fourth.

The agreement has to be structured: a fee model, a percentage, a basis, a guarantee, payment terms, a currency — as fields, with the signature attached to them. Then a placement inherits them, approved hours bill against them, and the invoice is reviewed rather than calculated.

Two habits finish the job. Number documents atomically, so two invoices can never take the same number — a duplicate number is a week of reconciliation for both finance teams. And put reminders on a schedule rather than on somebody’s memory: a sequence before and after the due date, with a receivables ledger sorted by how late things are, turns chasing from a monthly panic into a Tuesday.

In Echo Recruit

The quote is the contract

Terms are agreed on a quote as structured fields — contingency, retainer, contract markup or flat fee, in the client’s currency — and both sides e-sign, each confirmed by a six-digit code sent to their own address, with a certificate of completion. A fee below the floor needs a written reason and an admin’s approval before the quote can be sent. Revising a sent quote creates a linked new draft rather than editing history.

On signature the terms apply themselves to the client account, and every later placement inherits them. Commission and approved hours become invoice lines at the rate the quote set; reminders run on a 15/7/5/3/2/1/0-day schedule; numbering is atomic; and both parties’ identity is frozen onto the document the moment it stops being a draft.

Share [facebook-f icon](http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement) [linkedin-in icon](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement) [twitter icon](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement) [pinterest-p icon](http://pinterest.com/pin/create/link/?url=https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement) [envelope icon](mailto:?body=https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement)

linkedin-in icon

 

Copyright © 2025, Echo Recruit

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Echo Recruit",
    "url" : "https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/author/echo-recruit"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-09-28T06:19:22.992Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-09-28T06:19:22.000Z",
  "headline" : "A fee agreement that can't reach the invoice isn't an agreement",
  "mainEntityOfPage" : {
    "@id" : "https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement",
    "@type" : "WebPage"
  },
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "url" : "https://www.echorecruit.com/hubfs/image-1789710173979.png"
    },
    "name" : "Echo Recruit"
  }
}
```

```json
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Article",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : [ "Echo Recruit" ]
  },
  "datePublished" : "2026-09-28T06:19:22+0000",
  "description" : "What a recruitment fee agreement must specify to survive the trip to an invoice: the clause worth more than the percentage, and how to make a fee floor real.",
  "headline" : "A fee agreement that can't reach the invoice isn't an agreement",
  "image" : "",
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "url" : "https://www.echorecruit.com/hubfs/image-1789710173979.png"
    },
    "name" : "Echo Recruit"
  },
  "url" : "https://www.echorecruit.com/blog/a-fee-agreement-that-cant-reach-the-invoice-isnt-an-agreement"
}
```