Sorter terms and conditions

1. Who you are contracting with

You are entering into an agreement with Micromat Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 13455386) whose registered office is at 6 Carnegie Street, Rushden, NN10 9SN, trading as 'Sortr'. Sortr operates the Sortr platform, a UK micro-task marketplace that introduces customers (people who need a task done) to Sorters (people willing to do that task).

You are an independent self-employed person, not an employee or worker of Sortr. You provide your services to the customer who books you, not to Sortr. Sortr verifies that a task happened — through the location and photo checks described in these terms (§7, §8A) — for fraud-prevention and customer-protection purposes. Sortr does not direct the methods by which you work: it imposes no working methods, no supervision, no equipment requirements, and no clothing requirements, and it never tells you how to do a task.

Sortr never requires you to work, and never requires you to be available. There is no rota, no shift, no minimum, and no acceptance target. Sortr will never require you to accept a job, to be online, to be online at any particular time, or to keep yourself free for work. Declining costs you nothing (§3), away mode costs you nothing (§8), and how often you do either changes nothing (§3).

A job you have accepted is different, in one way: it has times on it. Every job carries a time by which the work has to be marked complete, and on most jobs a separate, earlier time by which you have to be at the address. The times come from the task, and they are the same for whoever takes the job. You are told how many minutes you get before you accept. §11C sets out how each is worked out, what stops each clock, and what happens if one runs out. Taking one job on those terms is not a promise to take another: you are as free to say no to the next offer as you were to say no to this one.

You are responsible for:

• Your own income tax + National Insurance (Sortr does not deduct PAYE)
• Your own working time + breaks (Sortr does not regulate whether or when you accept work; a job you have accepted carries the times at §11C)

Insurance. You must hold appropriate public liability insurance covering the task types you accept, and appropriate transport insurance where you use a vehicle in performing tasks. Sortr does not provide cover. You must provide evidence of your cover to Sortr on request. Sortr also recommends (but does not require) that you hold personal-accident cover for your own protection.

HMRC platform reporting. Sortr is required by law (SI 2023/817) to report information about you to HM Revenue and Customs each calendar year: your name, date of birth, address, National Insurance number, the bank account your payouts are sent to, the amounts paid to you each quarter, the fees Sortr deducted each quarter, and the number of tasks you completed each quarter. By 31 January each year Sortr will send you a copy of what was reported about you. Sortr does not provide tax advice. You are responsible for declaring your income — most Sorters need to register for Self Assessment (by 5 October after the end of the tax year in which you start), though if your gross trading income is £1,000 or less the trading allowance may mean you have nothing to declare.

National Insurance number. Sortr will ask you for your National Insurance number at signup or shortly afterwards, because Sortr must report it to HMRC (SI 2023/817). If you do not provide it, Sortr will remind you twice; if it is still missing 60 days after the first request, Sortr will pause further payouts. Your earnings remain yours, and paused amounts release as soon as you provide your number. Sortr cannot exempt you — this is a legal requirement on the platform, not a Sortr policy choice.

1A. Tax — what happens if your status is recharacterised

If HM Revenue and Customs determines that income tax or National Insurance should have been operated by Sortr on amounts you earned through the platform, you agree to reimburse Sortr for any income tax and primary Class 1 National Insurance contributions for which Sortr is made liable on your earnings, reduced by any tax or National Insurance you have already paid on the same income (for example through Self Assessment). This reimbursement expressly excludes employer (secondary) National Insurance contributions, which by law Sortr cannot recover from you (Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, Sch 1 para 3A). Any set-off of reimbursable amounts against your future payouts is made only under the express, itemised authorisation at §12A.

2. Substitution — you may send someone else to do a job you have accepted

You may send another adult to perform a task you have accepted, on your behalf. You do not need Sortr's permission and you do not need the customer's permission. You are not required to use this right, and you are not required to explain why you are using it. Sending someone is a notification, not a request — Sortr's permission is neither needed nor given.

How you send someone: the pass. From the job screen, tap "Can't make it?" and choose "Send someone else". You give their first name and their UK mobile number. Sortr texts them a single-use link. That is the whole of it, and it takes about forty seconds.

Sortr does not approve, refuse, or vet the person you send, at any point. There is no pool to pick from, no list of approved substitutes, no admin review, no waiting for a decision, and no way for Sortr to say no to the person you chose. Every check below is mechanical and automatic: it either passes or it does not, and no Sortr person exercises judgement about your substitute.

2.1 What Sortr collects from the person you send, and why

Your substitute has to be someone Sortr can contact, hold to an undertaking, and account to if something goes wrong on site. To do the job they:

• Confirm the number you gave. Sortr texts a code to that number. A forwarded link does not work without that phone.
• Sign up for an ordinary Sortr account (or sign in, if they already have one). They do not become a Sorter. They get no bank details, no payouts, no job feed, no ratings and no profile.
• Give their date of birth and confirm they are 18 or over. Under 18 is a hard stop and the pass fails.
• Give an emergency contact — a name and a number. This is not optional. If they press SOS (§8B) on your job, that is who the alert goes to, and it has to be their person, not yours.
• Take a photo of themselves for the customer to see.
• Are screened against the UK financial-sanctions (OFSI) consolidated list, by name and date of birth. A match stops the pass. It does nothing to their account.
• Accept a short undertaking setting out that they are covering for you, that Sortr is not paying them and cannot recover money for them, that Sortr has checked their age and screened their name but has not checked their photo ID, that the customer is told exactly that, that their first name and photo are shown to the customer, that they cannot send anyone else, and basic lone-worker safety.

None of that is Sortr deciding whether your substitute is suitable. It is Sortr being able to reach them, knowing they are an adult, having somewhere to call if they are hurt, and not putting a sanctioned person on a customer's doorstep. Sortr forms no view about whether they are any good at the task. That is your judgement, and it stays your judgement.

2.2 You stay the Sorter on the job

Sending someone else does not move the job off you. You remain the person Sortr pays, the person responsible for the work, the person the customer's dispute (§7) is addressed to, and the person any consequence lands on. Your substitute performs; you are answerable.

2.3 Money — Sortr pays you, never your substitute

Sortr pays you, in full, whether you did the work yourself or sent someone. The same amount, the same 80/20 split, the same payout schedule and the same tier (§5). Nothing about what you are paid changes because you used this right.

One thing about the timing is different, and it is stated here rather than left to be discovered. On a job someone else performed, the customer has a button they do not have on a job you did yourself: they may pause the automatic confirmation once, for 24 hours, while they look at what was done. It cannot be used twice, it cannot run past 24 hours, and it changes no amount. At worst it delays your payment by a day. It can never withhold your pay and it can never reduce it.

Whatever you pay your substitute is between you and them. Sortr does not set it, does not ask what it is, does not record it, does not take a cut of it, does not charge a fee for the introduction, and will never pay your substitute directly. That is a deliberate choice: the arrangement between you and the person you engage is your business, and Sortr is not a party to it and not your agent in it.

It is a debt you owe. If you do not pay them, that is a matter between you and them, and they may pursue it as they would any other unpaid bill. Sortr gives your substitute a Work Record at the end of the job — the date, the times, the task, your full legal name, and what Sortr paid you for that job — so they are not left without evidence. Sortr does not collect the money, does not adjudicate whether you owe it, and takes no position on the amount.

2.4 The customer is told, and can walk away — but cannot veto your choice

When your substitute is verified and ready, Sortr tells the customer who is coming, shows them the photo, tells them you are still responsible and still the person they are paying, and tells them plainly that Sortr has checked your substitute's age and screened their name against the UK sanctions list but has not checked their photo ID.

The customer cannot refuse the person you chose and keep you on the job. They have exactly the ordinary rights any customer has when told a different person is coming: they can carry on, they can cancel their booking free of charge, or they can ask Sortr to find them a different Sorter. Saying nothing means the job goes ahead.

If the customer asks for a different Sorter, that is recorded as a release. This is the part to read twice. Where the customer declines your substitute and Sortr re-dispatches the job to someone else, it is counted exactly as if you had released the job yourself — because that is what happened: the job you accepted was not performed by you, and Sortr had to find someone else for the customer. It is not counted twice, it is not counted worse, and it is not counted as a no-show. It is counted as a release, on the same counters, with the same effect as a release.

That is disclosed rather than left quietly true because, without it, a Sorter who wanted out of a job late could invite a decline in chat and turn a release into a clean exit. The metering removes that, and telling you about it is what makes the metering fair.

2.5 Using a substitute is never itself held against you

Using a substitute is never itself held against you. That you sent someone — this time, or however often — is never a negative factor in dispute scoring, fraud flagging, graduation, tier, or account standing. Issuing a pass, revoking one, or a pass that is never taken up leaves no record against you of any kind. What this promise does not change is the job's outcome: if nobody arrives in time, that is a strike against you on exactly the same rule as if you had not arrived yourself (§2.8, §11C) — no more, no less — and you may ask for it to be reviewed in the same way (§10).

The same applies to your reliability score and tier (§10). Sending someone is never itself an input to either. But a booking that ends under §11C while your substitute held it counts toward your score and your tier on exactly the same rule as if it had been you.

One thing is set aside, and this is the whole rule for it. Sortr checks a substitute's location more strictly than it checks yours (§8A). Where that stricter check is the only thing that stopped someone who was at the address and tried to mark themselves there, the strike is set aside on the terms below, and where it is set aside it counts toward nothing: not the 3-in-14 rule, not your reliability score, not your tier. You are not answerable for a measurement Sortr made harder. Someone has to have tried, though: a substitute who never opened the app leaves nothing to set aside, and that strike counts like any other. The rest of this section is when the set-aside applies and when it does not. It is stated here once — where another section mentions it, that section points back here rather than restating the rule.

It applies in two situations, and in no others. The first is where their phone gave no usable location at all — either it never got a location, or the record of the attempt carries no distance. A record that measured nothing says nothing about where they were standing, so Sortr treats it the same as no location, in your favour. The second is where the location their phone did give, fresh or last known, was inside the allowance your own evidence route would have been given on that job. Inside that allowance you would have got through yourself, so what refused them was Sortr's stricter measurement and not their absence.

Beyond your own allowance, the strike stands. If their phone was last seen further from the job than your own route would have allowed, nobody has been shown to have been there, and the booking ends the way any other missed job ends (§2.8, §11C). Standing where they stood, on that evidence, you would have been refused too.

A faked location ends it. Where any arrival attempt made by the person you sent, on that pass, used a faked or mocked location, there is no set-aside for that pass — whatever else their attempts show. Faking a location is the conduct of the person you chose to send, and the strike stands. It is their attempts on their own pass that are looked at: someone you sent earlier, on a pass that is over, cannot cost the person holding the job now.

The first time is automatic. A second inside 14 days is looked at by a person. Where the set-aside would rest only on their phone giving no location at all — nothing measured, nothing to check — Sortr sets the first such strike aside automatically and you do not have to ask. If it happens again within 14 days, counting all your jobs and whoever you sent, the second is not automatic: a person at Sortr looks at it first. While they look, the strike counts, like any other strike. If they find it genuine it is set aside, anything it caused is lifted, and you are told the outcome word for word, exactly as if you had asked for the review yourself — and you may still ask for a review of it yourself at any time, on the ordinary route (§10, §11C). Where their phone gave a location near the job, none of this applies and the set-aside stays automatic, however often it happens.

Why the second one waits. A set-aside that rests on no location evidence at all rests on nothing anyone can check, which makes it the one a dishonest pattern would lean on and repeat. Having a person read the second costs an honest Sorter a wait they will almost never have; not reading it would leave a free missed job open to anyone willing to do it twice.

Sortr measures how often the right is used, because it needs to know the right is real. It never acts on that number against you.

Beyond the outcome rule just stated, two things are carved out of that promise, and here they are, stated rather than hidden:

• (a) A customer's decline is metered as a release (§2.4). That is a consequence of the job being re-dispatched, not of you having used the right — a release you make yourself is metered identically.
• (b) Repeatedly not paying your substitutes suspends your ability to issue passes. If two substitutes, who are different people, report within a rolling 90 days that you did not pay them, and you either do not answer a report within 14 days of being told about it or Sortr upholds it, you cannot issue new passes for as long as that remains true. It lifts by itself as those reports age past 90 days, and answering a report takes it out of the count at any time. It does not touch your account, your tier, your graduation, your payouts, your dispute scoring or your account standing, and your existing jobs are unaffected. Sortr is not obliged to keep providing the route by which unpaid work reaches it. You are told about every report and get to answer it before anything happens.

2.6 What you promise about the person you send

You warrant that the person you send is 18 or over. Sortr asks them to confirm their date of birth and stops the pass if they say they are under 18, but Sortr does not see their documents. You know who you are sending; Sortr does not.

You indemnify Sortr against any claim, loss, fine or cost arising from your substitute being under 18, from your substitute not being who you said they were, or from your substitute's negligence or wilful misconduct on the job. This sits alongside, and does not replace, the indemnity you already give at §12A.

Your public liability insurance must cover the person you send. §1 already requires you to hold public liability cover appropriate to the task types you accept. Where you send someone else, that cover must respond to loss they cause while performing the task on your behalf. Whether a particular policy does that depends on its wording, and Sortr does not know what your policy says: check with your insurer before you use this right. If your cover does not respond, you are still responsible to the customer for the loss (§2.2) — you would simply be meeting it yourself.

2.7 Limits that are about running a platform, not about your right

Four limits apply. They are stated so they are not a surprise, and none of them is a judgement about you or about your substitute:

• Ten passes per Sorter per 24 hours. This is a cost and abuse limit on sending text messages, set an order of magnitude above any real use. It is not a cap on how often you may substitute.
• Not on a job for now. A pass takes a text message, a code, a signup and a stranger's travel time, and a customer who booked for now is already waiting. On a job for now the app will not issue a pass; the route out is release, which puts the job back for someone else in seconds.
• Not within 45 minutes of the job's start time. Your substitute needs time to get the code, sign up and get there. Inside 45 minutes, release the job instead — that route is unchanged and always open.
• One hop, and not after arrival. Your substitute cannot send someone else on. A pass cannot be started once someone has already arrived at the address: part-way through a job there is no clean way to say who did what.

You can revoke a pass at any time before your substitute arrives, instantly and without a reason — including the moment you see their name and photo, if that is not who you meant. A booking carries one live pass at a time, so revoking is also how you send it to someone else instead. Once they have arrived you cannot revoke: you cannot strand a person on a customer's property, and you cannot leave a job with nobody able to mark it complete. After arrival your routes are chat, the finish-by extension, admin, or SOS.

If your substitute never confirms, the pass simply expires, the job comes back to you, and you are told. No penalty, no counter, nothing recorded against you.

2.8 If your substitute does not turn up, or walks off the job

The consequence lands on you. If nobody arrives by your arrive-by time, or the job is abandoned after arrival, the booking ends the way it would have if you had not turned up yourself: unpaid, and a strike under §11C — on exactly the same rule, and reviewable on the same grounds, as if it had been you. You chose who to send; Sortr has no relationship with them and no way to hold them to your job.

One thing is not your failure. If the person you sent was at the address and made the attempt, and the only thing that refused them was the location machinery on their phone (§8A, §2.10), the strike is set aside automatically on the rule in §2.5 — which also says when it is not: a faked location, a phone last seen beyond the allowance you would have had, or a second set-aside resting on no location at all inside 14 days, which a person checks first. Where it is set aside it counts toward nothing — not the 3-in-14 rule, not your reliability score, not your tier. A substitute who turned up did not let you down, and a strike produced only by Sortr measuring them more strictly than it measures you is Sortr's asymmetry, not your choice of person. §2.5 is the rule; this paragraph adds nothing to it.

Sortr records that a substitute was involved on the strike itself, so that if a review or a contest under §11C looks at it, it is looking at what actually happened.

2.9 The clocks still run from your account

Your arrive-by and finish-by times at §11C are not affected by sending someone else. They come from the task and they run whoever performs it. On a pass job your substitute makes the taps that stop those clocks from their own phone, on their own account — but the clocks are on your booking and the outcome is yours. That is the one thing a substitution does not take off your hands.

One button does have a time on it, and it is not a clock. On a job with a start time — a job at a fixed time, or a repeat or window job — "On my way" does not open until an hour before that start time, for you and for anyone you send alike. It is there so a customer's full address is not revealed days ahead of the visit, not to measure anybody: it moves no deadline, it costs no money, and it is never a strike. A job for now has no start time to count back from and is not affected.

2.10 Evidence on a job someone else does

A job performed by a substitute carries more checks than one you do yourself, not fewer. Your substitute's arrival is checked against the address on their own phone and that check is enforced, not warned. They take a photo of themselves when they arrive, which the customer never sees and Sortr keeps only as a record of the visit in case something goes wrong. They take a photo before starting and a photo after finishing. This is not suspicion of your substitute; it is what makes a stranger's work provable, and it is what lets your money run on the ordinary clock (§2.3) rather than on a customer's approval.

The stricter check can never cost you a strike by itself, and §2.5 is the rule that makes that true. It is there to make the work provable, not to make your job easier to fail. Where your substitute was at the address and made the attempt, and that check is the only thing that refused them — they were too far for the tighter allowance but inside the one you would have had, or their phone gave no location at all — the strike is set aside and counts toward nothing. §2.5 states the exact rule, including the location-faking bar, the distance limit and the repeat check; nothing here widens it. You are measured on whether the job was delivered, never on whose phone found a satellite.

2.11 When you may use this route

You can issue a pass once you have accepted the version of these terms that contains this section. Until then the app will not let you: you cannot exercise a right your agreement does not yet contain. You accept an updated version in the app — when Sortr asks you to accept one, it shows you what has changed and you accept there. This page is a copy of the terms, not the place you accept them. Releasing a job is unaffected and always available.

3. Refusal — you may decline any job for any reason or no reason

You may decline any job offered to you for any reason or no reason. You are not required to explain a refusal.

Declining a job has NO consequence in any Sortr-side metric. In particular, declining does not affect:

• Whether, or how often, you are included in the jobs offered to you — no decline, however frequent, changes your dispatch inclusion or the order in which offers reach you
• Your payout tier (first-job fast-track, new-Sorter, or established)
• Your progress toward graduation (the gate that removes the new-Sorter hold)
• Your access to the job feed
• Any rating, score, badge, or status — declining is never recorded as a rating, score, badge, or status visible to customers or other Sorters, and is never an input to any reliability score or tier (§11C)

A declined job is not visible to the customer as having been offered to you. Customers do not learn the identity of Sorters who were offered the job but did not accept.

Declining is not the same as accepting and then dropping. The no-consequence rule above is limited to declining an offer, using away mode (§8), or ignoring a "work near you" nudge — none of these ever affects dispatch. It does not extend to conduct after you accept. Separately from declining, an accept-then-drop (cancelling a booking you had accepted) or a no-show (§11C) can lower a reliability score/tier that, while the reliability system is live, reduces the range of future offers you are included in (a "watch-tier" re-offer exclusion) — though standing down under §3A (a job outside its stated limits, an unsafe site, or a blocked visit) never does, provided you cancel the booking before its arrive-by or finish-by time runs out (§11C).

3A. Task scope — the limits, and turning down a job that is outside them

Every task has stated limits. Each task in the Sortr catalog is sold to the customer within stated limits — a count or an area, what is not included, and what the customer must leave out for you. The same limits are shown to you: on the job offer before you accept, and in full on the job once you have. The limits shown to you and the limits shown to the customer are generated from the same record, so what you are asked to do and what they were told they were buying cannot differ.

You decide whether a job is within its limits. If, at any point before or after you accept — including after you arrive — you judge that a job is outside its stated limits, or that it cannot be done safely, or that the customer has not left out something the task depends on, you may:

• decline it, if you have not accepted (§3 applies and nothing changes); or
• report it and stand down, if you have accepted, by cancelling the booking and picking the reason that fits — that the job is bigger than the booking covers, that what you need isn't left out, or that the site feels unsafe.

Standing down for any of those reasons is free, and it is never counted against you. A booking you cancel for one of those reasons:

• is not counted as an accept-then-drop, and does not feed your reliability score or tier (§10, §11C) — neither as a bad event nor in the total it is measured against;
• is not counted in your cancellation rate for the purposes of any admin review flag;
• is not a no-show and does not count toward a strike or an accept-cooldown (§11C), even where you had already arrived — as long as you cancel the job, and pick the reason, before its time runs out. Once you have tapped "I've arrived", that is usually 20 minutes (§11C). So take your photograph and cancel straight after — do not leave the cancelling until last. If the time runs out first the job ends as a no-show; ask for the strike to be disregarded under §11C;
• does not affect your progress toward graduation (§5), your payout tier, your access to the job feed, or your standing with Sortr — with one narrow, booking-scoped exception: if you stand down from the same booking twice, that one booking may stop being re-offered to you (nothing beyond that booking is affected);
• is not shown to other customers, and is never a rating, score, badge or status.

Sortr may review the pattern of these reports — to fix a task whose description is wrong, or where a customer repeatedly books outside the limits. That review is about the task and the customer, never about you.

You are not required to do more than the limits. Nothing obliges you to go beyond a task's stated limits, and Sortr will never ask you to. If you choose to do a little more, that is yours to choose and is unpaid. There is never money to collect at the door: everything you are paid comes through the platform — the price the customer chose when they booked, and any tip they add in the app (§5). Sortr never asks you to take payment from a customer, and a customer offering to pay you on the day for extra work is booking outside the platform (their terms, §2A, tell them the same).

If a customer has not left out what the task needs. Where a task depends on the customer leaving something out and it is not there — or you arrive and the job is materially bigger than the stated limits — photograph what you found, then stand down under this section. Do not start the task, and do not improvise it without what it needs: a task done without what it depends on is not the service the customer bought.

A blocked visit pays you a share of the call-out fee. Where the customer's booking is cancelled under this section after you have arrived and before the task has begun, with your photograph of what you found, the customer is charged the call-out fee their terms disclose, and you receive your share of it — the same arrived-cancel compensation, at the same amount, paid the same way, as when a customer cancels after you arrive (§5). It is funded by that fee, not by Sortr and not from any other Sorter's pay. Where the fee does not apply — for example, you stood down before arriving, there is no photograph, the task had already begun, or you stood down because the site felt unsafe — standing down is still free and still never counted against you, but no fee is charged and no share is paid.

4. Pricing — your earnings floors

Sortr's catalog price for each task category is a default offer to the customer, not a fee scale mandated to you. What you control is your earnings floor for each category: the minimum amount you will be paid (your 80% share of the task price) for a job in that category.

• Each category has a floor derived from Sortr's catalog — the lowest Sorter payout across the active catalog entries for that category. Sortr will never offer you a job whose payout to you is below your floor.
• You may raise your floor above the derived floor at any time, lower it back down to the derived floor (never below it), or opt out of a category entirely by selecting "I don't do this".
• Changes apply to future job offers only — not to a job you have already accepted.

If no Sorter accepts a job at the customer's current price, Sortr may invite the customer to raise the price in stages (customer-side price escalation). The job is then re-offered at each higher price; your payout is always 80% of the full task price (before any Sortr-funded promotion the customer uses), plus any tip net of its card-processing fee (§5). You never bid, quote, or counter-offer on the platform — your only decisions are your floors, your category opt-outs, and whether to accept or decline each offer shown to you.

5. Payout schedule

You are paid by Stripe Connect to the bank account you nominated at signup. Sortr's 20% platform fee is taken at the point the customer's payment is captured; the remaining 80% becomes your payout balance.

No payment is captured, and no payout balance arises, on a booking that ends under §11C — the customer is not charged, so there is nothing to share. This is not a deduction, a reversal, or a set-off; §12A(3) lists every amount Sortr may ever set off against your payouts, and this is not one of them.

Tips. Any tip a customer adds is passed to you minus the card-payment processing fee our payment provider charges on the tip transaction — Sortr itself takes no cut of tips. The deduction is the provider's actual fee for that transaction, not an estimate or a Sortr charge. Tips do not count toward your earnings floor (§4).

Promotions and credits. Where a customer pays with a Sortr promotional code or account credit, the discount is funded entirely from Sortr's platform fee. Your payout is calculated on the full undiscounted task price and is never reduced by a customer's promotion.

Arrived-cancel compensation. If a booking is cancelled after you have arrived and before the task has begun — whether the customer cancels (a "wasted trip"), or you stand down at a blocked visit under §3A with a photograph of what you found — Sortr may charge the customer a flat £3 arrived-cancel (call-out) fee. Your 80% share of that fee — £2.40 — is passed to you as compensation for the wasted trip, whichever way the cancellation arose (Sortr keeps the remaining £0.60 as its 20% share); both routes are the arrived-cancel fee under this §5, so the §12A(3) parity reversal applies equally if the customer's fee is later refunded or waived. This is the same 80/20 split as a completed task, but it is compensation for a trip you actually made, not payment for a completed task. The VAT character of this £3 fee is unresolved — whether it is outside-scope compensation or consideration for a taxable supply is a tax-treatment question that this clause does not decide, and is being determined separately. This fee applies only while the platform's call-out-fee feature is switched on, and it is disclosed to the customer on the payment screen before they book and again before they confirm a cancellation.

VAT. Sortr's platform fee is 20% of the task price and is inclusive of VAT at the prevailing rate. Once registered, Sortr will account for that VAT out of its own fee (it does not reduce your payout) and will provide VAT invoices for its fee to VAT-registered Sorters (and to any other Sorter on request).

Your payout balance is released to your bank account on a schedule that depends on your tier:

Graduation is the point at which the new-Sorter hold is removed. You graduate when ALL of the following are true:

• You have completed at least 3 jobs
• At least 21 days have passed since your first payout
• Your jobs span at least 3 distinct customers (and at least one of those customers has held a Sortr account for 30+ days with a payment-method history Sortr considers non-collusive)
• You have no open dispute complaints
• Your account does not appear on the Sortr fraud-link graph

Sortr tells you in-app when you graduate. The conditions above are published so you can count them yourself; the two that turn on Sortr's fraud checks — whether a customer's payment-method history is one Sortr considers non-collusive, and whether your account appears on the fraud-link graph — are confirmed at graduation rather than reported to you as they go.

Sortr does NOT retain the time-value of your held funds for its own benefit. The funds sit in Stripe's custody. The hold exists solely to manage the risk that a customer raises a dispute or chargeback during the dispute window (§7 below). Sortr never sweeps your held funds to a Sortr-controlled bank account, and Sortr does not earn interest on them.

Payout release is additionally subject to §9 (information Sortr is legally required to collect, including your National Insurance number), §11 (financial crime and sanctions), §11A (suspected-fraud remedies), and §11B (lawful delay).

5A. Payment collection agency

You appoint Sortr as your commercial agent to conclude bookings with customers on your behalf at the prices determined under §4, and to collect payment of the task price and of any tip on your behalf through Stripe. Sortr's 20% platform fee is deducted from the task price collected as your agent; the card-payment processing fee on a tip transaction (§5) is deducted from the tip collected as your agent. Sortr acts as agent for you (the payee) only — never for the customer — in relation to payment collection.

6. Negative balance — how Sortr handles a Sorter who owes the platform

If a customer dispute or chargeback is upheld against you AFTER your payout has already been released, your Sortr account balance may go negative. Sortr's policy is:

Sortr does NOT enable Stripe's automatic-debit-negative-balance feature. Stripe will never debit your bank account to recover a negative balance on your behalf. Recovery happens (where it happens at all) by invoice, after the affordability check.

No netting against future earnings. Sortr will never deduct an ordinary negative balance from your future task earnings. Your future payouts are calculated as if your balance were zero; recovery happens only by the invoice process above. The only set-offs Sortr may ever make against a payout are the express, itemised authorisations at §6 (dispute-driven payout reversal, below — cross-referring §7), §11A (fraud recovery) and §12A (including the §1A tax reimbursement) — never implicit ledger behaviour.

Dispute-driven payout reversals (an express, itemised set-off). A customer dispute (§7) may reverse your payout for the booking concerned. This is distinct from an ordinary negative balance and is expressly authorised here, so it is not "implicit ledger behaviour". Two situations differ:

• Still-held payout — not a clawback. Where your payout for that booking has not yet been released (it is still deferred pending confirmation, §5), a reversal cancels the still-held amount before it ever leaves the platform. No money paid to you is taken back.
• Already-released payout — a genuine set-off. Where your payout has already been released, recovering it is a genuine set-off against your future payouts, made only under this express authorisation.

A dispute reversal is full where you concede the dispute (§7) or the dispute is upheld against you, and proportional where a Sortr admin issues a partial customer refund — in which case the amount reversed is your payout for that booking multiplied by the refunded fraction (refund × your payout ÷ the gross task price).

Every dispute reversal is itemised to you in the same way as §11A and §12A: Sortr notifies you in writing of the booking, the amount, and the provision relied on, at or before the deduction. Where an already-released reversal — including a proportional partial-reversal — takes your balance negative, the £150 / Universal Credit write-off and the affordability regime in this §6 apply to that negative balance exactly as they do to a full dispute loss (the fraud carve-out aside).

You may tell Sortr you receive Universal Credit at any time from your Sorter dashboard. Sortr does not verify this directly with the DWP; the flag is a self-declaration that triggers the carve-out above.

Fraud carve-out. The write-off policy in this section does not apply where Sortr reasonably suspects the negative balance arises wholly or partly from fraud, collusion, fabricated bookings, manipulated evidence, or any breach of §11. In those cases Sortr may recover the full amount, set it off against any balance held (under the express authorisation at §11A), and report the matter — regardless of the amount and regardless of any Universal Credit declaration. A suspicion-flagged account is routed to manual review by Sortr's Financial Crime Lead before any write-off is applied.

7. Customer disputes — what happens, what you can do

A customer may raise a "Report a problem" complaint within 7 days of you marking the task complete. After 7 days, the customer must go to their card issuer (chargeback) — Sortr no longer handles the case directly.

When a customer reports a problem against you:

1. Sortr notifies you immediately with the customer's category selection (e.g. "didn't show up" / "incomplete" / "damage").
2. The customer's free-text or voice-note explanation + photos are revealed to you 1 hour after the initial notification — a cool-off window designed to let initial heat dissipate before you read the detail.
3. You have 72 hours from confirmed delivery of the notification to respond. Confirmed delivery is established by push acknowledgement, email-open, or SMS delivery receipt. If none of these confirm within 96 hours, a human Sortr admin will confirm deemed-delivery before the 72-hour clock starts.
4. If you respond (rather than accepting the issue — see below), your response uploads to the admin queue. A Sortr admin reviews both sides within 5 working days and decides the case.

Accepting the issue (concede). At any point, instead of responding, you may choose to accept the issue. This is an informed, voluntary election — never a default, and never pre-selected for you. Accepting resolves the case in the customer's favour without any admin adjudication: the customer receives a full refund and your payout for that booking is fully reversed (§6). Because this moves money, it is an admission that resolves the booking, so the app shows you the exact amount and asks you to confirm deliberately before anything happens.

If instead a Sortr admin resolves a dispute with a partial refund, your payout is reversed in proportion to that refund (the same proportional reversal as §6). Either way, where a reversal takes your balance negative, §6 governs (including the £150 / Universal Credit write-off).

How an accepted issue is used. Accepting the issue resolves that one booking and nothing more. The fact that you accepted is never fed into your reliability score or tier (§10, §11C), your customer rating, your progress toward graduation (§5), or your access to future work. It is scope-limited to the dispute it resolves, in the same way as a §7 verdict. This ring-fence is a hard technical firewall, not a policy preference: the record that you conceded — and any admission of fault it implies — is written nowhere that any reliability, rating, graduation, allocation, or dispatch-eligibility system can read it. Keeping it ring-fenced is required, not merely permitted — both because treating a platform-designed concession as a performance-discipline signal would count against Sortr on the question of your employment status, and because the data-protection principle of purpose limitation (UK GDPR Article 5(1)(b)) bars re-using information collected to resolve one dispute for the unrelated purpose of scoring or allocating your work.

A dispute decision is Sortr's adjudication, as a neutral platform, of the contract between you and the customer, under rules both of you accepted at booking. It is not a performance review by Sortr of work done for Sortr.

The admin's decision is supported by a score, not decided by it. The scoring weighs:

• Whether an in-app native-camera GPS photo at task completion was within 50 metres of the booking address
• Whether the photo's timestamp falls in the expected window
• Whether the photo passes Sortr's duplicate-detection check (the same photo cannot be submitted across multiple bookings)
• Whether your KYC + Stripe Connect status is clean
• Any other relevant evidence (customer's prior complaints, Sorter's prior history)

The in-app GPS photo is optional evidence, not a requirement. It is the strongest single piece of evidence you can put in your own favour, and Sortr recommends you capture one on every job — but its absence never automatically decides a case against you. Chat messages, customer confirmations, photos from any other device, and third-party evidence are all considered on their merits (in-app captures carry the most weight because they resist fabrication). On a job performed under a pass (§2), in-app photo provenance is required and an omitted location tag is treated as a mismatch, not as neutral.

Every outcome is confirmed by a human. If the score crosses Sortr's threshold, the case is referred to a Sortr admin with a recommendation in your favour; the admin reviews and substantively confirms the outcome before it takes effect. If the score is below threshold, a Sortr admin reviews the case on its merits — Sortr does NOT auto-refund a close-call case. No dispute is decided by the automated score alone, for you or for the customer. The one route that resolves a dispute without an admin decision is your own election to accept the issue (above) — a decision you make, not the automated score.

Hardship appeal — one-shot, 14 days

If a dispute is decided against you and you believe the outcome is materially wrong (not just disappointing), you may file a hardship appeal within 14 days of the admin's decision. You may file one appeal per dispute. The appeal goes to a different Sortr admin than the one who made the original decision.

The hardship appeal is intended for cases where you have new evidence or where the original decision relied on a factual error. It is not a routine right of second review.

8. Away mode

You may pause your Sorter feed ("away mode") at any time, for any duration, as often as you choose, by toggling "away mode" in your dashboard. While away mode is on, you receive no job offers. Customers do not see your availability flagged. Use of away mode is never a factor in any Sortr-side metric, tier, dispatch priority, or account standing.

Away mode does not affect bookings you have already accepted, and cannot be retro-activated to cover a job you have already accepted — §11C governs the times that apply to a booking you have already accepted.

You may also resign from the platform at any time by deactivating your account from the dashboard.

8A. Location data — what Sortr collects while you work

What is collected. While you have an active job, the Sortr app collects your device's precise location at intervals of roughly 90 seconds.

When. Collection runs only between your acceptance of a booking and your marking it complete. Sortr does not collect your location outside an active job, and does not track you while you are merely online or browsing the feed.

Purposes. Your live location is used for: (a) customer safety and reassurance — the booking customer can see your approach and arrival on a live map; (b) dispute evidence under §7; and (c) the arrival check described below. It is expressly not used for performance ranking, dispatch priority, or discipline beyond the arrival check disclosed here.

Who sees it. Only the customer for the active booking sees your live position, and only once you are within approximately 1 mile of the booking address (the privacy gate) — your wider movements are not shown. Sortr admins may access location records for safety incidents and dispute resolution.

Arrival check. Sortr verifies that your device was at (or near) the booking address at arrival. If the check cannot be satisfied, Sortr may warn you, and — only after warning and per the consequence ladder published in-app — may decline to treat the booking as attended. The app also detects mock-GPS tools; use of location-spoofing software on an active job is a breach of §11. These checks verify that you attended; they do not direct how you perform the task (§1). This is only about the location check when you tap "I've arrived". Your arrive-by and finish-by times (§11C) are separate: they are clocks, not location checks, they give you no warning, and they run out whether or not the location check is involved. While the location check is set to warn you rather than block you, it can never stop you from stopping the clock. If the location check cannot confirm you are there, the app may ask you to take a photo on site to mark your arrival. Sortr keeps that photo only as a record that you attended (180 days after the booking ends, or with the dispute record if the booking is disputed); the customer does not see it.

On a job performed under a pass (§2) the arrival check applies to the person performing, on their own device, and is enforced rather than warned: they do not get the "confirm you are there anyway" option §11C gives you on a job you do yourself. Where that stricter check is the only thing that stopped a substitute who was there from marking arrival, the strike it produces is set aside on the rule in §2.5 — which states when that is automatic and when it is not — and counts toward nothing where it is set aside (§2.5, §11C).

Lawful basis. Sortr processes this data on the basis of its legitimate interests (a legitimate-interests assessment is on record and available via the privacy policy).

8B. SOS — what the safety button does (and does not do)

The SOS button in the Sortr app does two things only: it sends your live location and an alert to the emergency contact you nominated, and it logs the event with Sortr.

It is not monitored in real time by Sortr staff. It is not connected to the police or any emergency service. It depends on your device having battery and signal. In an emergency, always call 999 first.

Sortr provides SOS as a supplementary convenience. Sortr does not undertake to monitor SOS alerts, to respond to them, or to ensure their delivery.

9. KYC + Stripe Connect onboarding

To pay you, Sortr uses Stripe Connect. Stripe is the entity licensed to hold and transfer your earnings. Sortr does not at any point hold your money in a Sortr-controlled bank account.

Before your first payout, Stripe will collect:

• Your full name
• Your date of birth
• Your address
• A government-issued photo ID
• A selfie matching the photo ID

This information is processed under Stripe's terms (linked from the Sortr signup flow). Sortr receives a pass/fail KYC verdict plus the field values you provide; Sortr does not receive the photo ID image or the selfie image.

If Stripe's KYC verification fails, your payout cannot be released until the issue is resolved. Sortr will tell you in-app what step is needed.

Sortr will also ask you for your National Insurance number at signup or shortly afterwards, for HMRC platform-reporting purposes under SI 2023/817 (see §1). If you do not provide it, Sortr will remind you twice; if it is still missing 60 days after the first request, further payouts pause until you provide it — your earnings remain yours and release as soon as you do. The NINO is held by Sortr separately from the Stripe KYC payload.

10. Automated decisions and your right to a human review

Some Sortr decisions are made or supported by automated systems:

• Whether you graduate (the gate at §5)
• Whether your account is flagged for admin review (e.g. unusual patterns of customer disputes, link-graph collisions with another account)
• Whether a dispute photo passes the GPS / timestamp / duplicate-detection scoring (the evidence-weighting score that supports — but never decides — a dispute outcome at §7)
• Your reliability score and tier, and whether a low ("watch") tier excludes you from the re-offer of a booking (the §11C reliability re-offer exclusion)
• Whether an accepted booking is automatically ended because your arrive-by or finish-by time passed (§11C), and the strike — and any accept-cooldown — that follows

Under Article 22C of the UK GDPR (inserted by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, in force 5 February 2026), you have the right to:

1. Be told what triggered the decision. Sortr will tell you in the app what triggered any decision affecting you.
2. Make representations in writing. The in-app "why this happened" panel includes a representations form (text + file upload).
3. Have a human review the decision. Sortr admins (not automated systems) make the final call on every flagged account, every dispute, and every graduation gate appeal.
4. Escalate to Sortr's Data Protection Officer at privacy@sortr.uk, and from there to the Information Commissioner's Office (https://ico.org.uk).

None of these automated systems — including the reliability score and tier — uses special category data (UK GDPR Article 9) as an input.

For the reliability score and tier in particular, the logic is:

Your reliability tier is lowered only by accept-then-drop (cancelling a booking you had accepted) and by bookings that ended because nobody arrived — you, or a substitute you sent under §2, a substituted ending counting on the same rule as your own (except where it was set aside on the rule in §2.5 because only the §8A check failed). Nothing counts until it is at least 24 hours old — a cancellation, a no-show or a completed job is ignored for its first 24 hours, so nothing you did today can move your tier today — and your tier is scored only once your work spans at least 3 distinct customers.

You can contest a reliability-tier assignment through the same Article 22C route: you will be told when your tier changes, you may make written representations, and a human Sortr admin can override the tier — recording a non-algorithmic factor and clearing it by human decision so it stops affecting your offers — with escalation to the Data Protection Officer and the ICO as above.

For automatic flagging in particular, the trigger is:

3 or more upheld dispute complaints in the trailing 30 days, OR an upheld-dispute rate of 0.5% or higher across your bookings in the trailing 30 days. The rate trigger applies only once you have 20 or more bookings in that 30-day window. Both triggers look only at the trailing 30 days, so a flag is never perpetual — it lapses as the window rolls forward.

If you cross either trigger, your account is added to an admin review queue. No automated suspension occurs. A Sortr admin reviews on its merits within 5 working days.

For the §11C times in particular, the logic is:

When you accept a job, Sortr fixes one instant and stores it on that booking: for a job for now, the moment you accepted plus twice the task's recorded time; for a job at a fixed time, the start of the slot plus twice that time; for a repeat or window job, the end of the window plus 15 minutes. Tapping "I've arrived" cancels it and starts a second clock of the same length, which "Mark complete" cancels (on a repeat or window job there is one clock, and only "Mark complete" stops it). If an instant passes while the booking is still open, the booking is ended and a strike is recorded. Nothing else decides whether the time runs out — not how far away you were when you accepted, not your acceptance rate, not how often you decline, not your away mode, not how long you took on any other job. Whether a strike leads to a cooldown is a straight count of your strikes in the last 14 days — no scoring and no judgement. (Your location is checked when you tap "I've arrived" — §8A.)

You can contest an automatic ending, or the strike it recorded, through the same Article 22C route: you will be told when a booking of yours ends this way — including where the person performing it was a substitute you sent under §2: the telling goes to you, because the booking, the strike and the review are yours — you may make written representations, and a human Sortr admin can disregard the strike and lift any cooldown it caused — with escalation to the Data Protection Officer and the ICO as above.

11. ECCTA 2023 + financial crime

Sortr maintains fraud-prevention procedures informed by the Home Office guidance to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 failure-to-prevent-fraud offence (November 2024), adopted voluntarily — Sortr is currently below the size threshold at which that offence applies. You agree not to use the platform for fraudulent purposes. The following will result in account closure and may be reported to the police, HMRC, and Sortr's Financial Crime Lead:

• Use of a false identity or fraudulent KYC documents
• Collusion with customers to inflate or fabricate jobs
• Manipulation of dispute outcomes or dispute evidence (including use of location-spoofing software on an active job, §8A)
• Offering, promising, or giving anything of value to any Sortr employee, contractor, admin, or reviewer to influence any platform decision (including dispute outcomes, verifications, appeals, or write-offs)

Sanctions screening. Sortr screens Sorter accounts against the OFSI consolidated sanctions list at onboarding, before payout releases, and on an ongoing basis. A name-and-date-of-birth match is reviewed by a human admin, and you may make representations as in §10. However, where Sortr knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that you are a designated person under UK financial-sanctions legislation, Sortr is required by law to immediately suspend all payouts and any other dealings with your funds — before, and independently of, that review — and may resume only under an OFSI licence or once the match is cleared as a false positive. Sortr is not liable for losses arising from steps taken in good faith to comply with sanctions law.

11A. Remedies on suspected fraud

Where Sortr reasonably suspects a breach of §11, Sortr may:

1. Suspend new job offers to you and/or withhold payouts connected to the affected bookings while it investigates. An investigation hold lasts no more than 10 working days unless escalated in writing, with an outer limit of 30 days for suspected fraud (or longer where the law requires — see §11B; sanctions-law holds under §11 are immediate, automatic, and last as long as the law requires). You will be given written notice of the ground (except where the law prohibits telling you — §11B), and the representations and human-review safeguards at §10 apply.
2. Reverse, reclaim, or set off amounts attributable to bookings Sortr reasonably determines were fraudulent or evidence-manipulated. Any set-off against a payout is made under this express authorisation, is itemised to you per event, and is subject to the §6 write-off policy except where the §6 fraud carve-out applies.
3. Report the matter to law enforcement, HMRC, and Sortr's Financial Crime Lead.

These rights survive termination of this agreement. Suspension and withholding under this section are never used for performance management, acceptance behaviour, or pricing decisions — they exist solely for fraud, safety, and legal-compliance investigation.

11B. Lawful delay

Sortr may delay, suspend, or decline any payout, refund, transaction, or account action where it reasonably believes the law requires it (including under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 or financial-sanctions legislation), or where it has made or is considering a disclosure to a law-enforcement or regulatory authority. Where the law restricts what Sortr can tell you, Sortr may decline to give reasons. Sortr is not liable for losses caused by such a delay, and time limits elsewhere in these terms are extended accordingly.

11C. Arriving and finishing on time — no-shows, strikes and accept-cooldowns

Each booking you accept is a separate contract between you and that customer, for a task they have bought to be delivered within a set time. If that time passes with the task not started — or, once started, not marked complete — the booking can no longer deliver what was bought, so it ends. None of that is true of an offer you decline: there, nobody is waiting.

In short. Most short jobs give you 20 minutes to get to the address and tap "I've arrived" — the offer tells you how many minutes you get, before you accept. Once you are there, you get the same again to tap "Mark complete". If either runs out, the job ends, you are not paid for it, and it counts as a strike. If you cannot make it, release or cancel first — neither is a strike.

Your "arrive by" time. Every job for now, and every job at a fixed time, has one: a single moment, fixed to that booking when you accept it, by which you have to be at the address and have tapped "I've arrived". The moment recorded against the booking when you accepted it is the moment that governs. It does not move afterwards, whatever the Sortr catalog says later. You never have to work it out — the offer tells you how many minutes you get, right next to how far away the job is, and once the job is yours the job screen shows the time itself.

• Short jobs give you 20 minutes. Bins in, bins out, washing in, washing on the line, a parcel moved to the garden or shed, the bird feeders, the "free" sign, salting the path and steps.
• Longer tasks give you longer — up to 60 minutes on the longest jobs Sortr sells today, such as mowing a lawn or a large dog-waste clear-out. No job ever gives you less than 20 minutes.

When your minutes start depends on the job.

• A job for now — the offer says "Now". Your minutes start the moment you tap Accept.
• A job at a fixed time — the offer shows a day and a time. Your minutes start at that time, not when you accepted. Taking a 2pm job at 9am starts nothing: a 2pm job with 20 minutes has to be reached by 2:20pm.

After you arrive, a second clock starts. On a job for now or a job at a fixed time, tapping "I've arrived" stops the first clock and starts a second one of the same length. A job that gave you 20 minutes to get there gives you another 20 minutes, from that tap, to tap "Mark complete". Tapping "Mark complete" is what stops it; starting the task does not. This exists so a booking cannot sit open indefinitely against a customer who is waiting — it is not a standard of pace you are measured against. How you do the work inside it is entirely yours (§1), and how long you took on a job you completed is never recorded, never scored, and never an input to any tier, rating or offer decision. If the job turns out to be bigger than its stated limits, that is a §3A stand-down and not a race: cancel and pick that reason before the time runs out.

Repeat and window jobs. These have no arrive-by time. They have one time instead: 15 minutes after the end of the window shown on the job, by which the job has to be marked complete. Arriving does not stop that clock — only marking it complete does. The job screen shows this time.

What stops the clock — and what does not. Only tapping "I've arrived" stops an arrive-by clock. Tapping "On my way" does not stop it, and neither does being outside the address with the app open. Only tapping "Mark complete" stops a finish-by clock. When you tap "I've arrived", the app checks your device's location against the booking address (§8A); if it cannot confirm you are there — because you are too far away, or your phone has not sent a recent location — it tells you and lets you confirm you are there anyway on a job you are doing yourself. There is no confirm-anyway on a job performed under a pass (§2): your substitute's arrival check is enforced (§2.10, §8A), and where it is the only thing that failed, the strike it produces is set aside on the rule in §2.5, which states when that is automatic and when a person at Sortr checks it first. Sortr will give you 14 days' notice under §14 before that ever changes.

When "On my way" opens. On a job with a start time — a job at a fixed time, or a repeat or window job — the "On my way" button does not open until an hour before that start time, whoever is performing: you, or a substitute you sent under §2. That is there to keep a customer's full address from being revealed days ahead of the visit. It is not a clock: it moves no deadline, it costs nothing, and it is never a strike. A job for now has no start time to count back from and is not affected.

If you send someone else (§2). You may always send a substitute, and using one is never itself held against you — what the job does still counts, on the same rule as if you had done it yourself (§2.5, §10). But the taps that stop these clocks still have to be made, in time: whoever does the work, someone has to mark the job arrived and complete — from your account, or from your substitute's, under a pass (§2). That is your responsibility, and it is the one thing a substitution does not take off your hands.

Where you see it. The allowance in minutes is shown on the job offer, next to the distance, before you accept, and again in the confirmation Sortr asks you for when you tap Accept. Once the job is yours, the job screen shows the arrive-by time itself as a date and time. On a repeat or window job the job screen shows the complete-by time. On a booking you accepted before this version took effect the app may not show a time at all; work it out as set out above.

If you cannot make it, act before the time runs out. There are two ways out, and neither is a strike. Which is open to you depends on the job and on how far along you are:

• Release the job — but only before you arrive. On a job for now, the job screen has a release button until you tap "I've arrived". On a job at a fixed time it is there only up to 30 minutes before the slot — and because that job's clock does not start until the slot, release is not available while that clock is running. Repeat and window jobs cannot be released at all. Releasing puts the job straight back for someone else. It is not a no-show, not a strike, and it never affects your reliability score. Two things do follow from it: you cannot take that same job again, and releasing the same booking more than once stops you being offered it again. A booking can be released 3 times in total across everyone it passes through; after that it can only be cancelled.
• Cancel the booking. Always available, on every kind of job, at every stage, until the booking ends — and once you have arrived, or once a fixed-time job is inside that last 30 minutes, it is the only way out. Cancelling is never a strike, whatever your reason. Where you cancel for one of the §3A reasons — the job is outside its stated limits, the site is unsafe, or the customer has not left out what the task needs — it counts nowhere at all. Being unable to get access counts nowhere either — the same wasted journey, with the same cause, as the §3A reasons. Other reasons count toward your reliability score (§10) once the cancellation is 24 hours old.

What happens if the time runs out. The booking ends automatically at that moment. If the automatic ending does not run on time — for example during a platform outage — it runs at the next hourly check, and never more than 24 hours after your time ran out; if it has not run by then, the booking does not end this way at all. If you arrive, or cancel, before the booking has actually ended, that counts: it is the ending that matters, not the time on the clock. Three separate things then follow, and they are separate things:

• The booking. It stops being yours. On a repeat or window job it may be offered to someone else; on other jobs it is cancelled and the customer is told. The customer is not charged: the hold on their card is released.
• The money. You are not paid for that job. Nothing was earned on it, so there is nothing to pay you. No money is taken off anything else — not your balance, not your other jobs, not anything you have already earned. Where the finish-by time ran out after you had arrived, the arrived-cancel fee share (§5, §3A) is not paid either, including where you had arrived and photographed a blocked visit but the booking ended before you cancelled it — so cancel rather than let the time run out. (In legal terms: because no payment ever became due, this is not a deduction, a clawback, or a set-off under §12A.)
• Your record. It counts as a strike. One strike on its own does nothing: it takes 3 strikes in 14 days before anything is paused, and strikes drop off as the 14 days roll on.

If you did the task. The rule above is about a booking that ended without the task being done. Where you — or the person you sent under §2 — arrived and performed the task, and it simply was not marked complete before your finish-by time, tell Sortr through the §10 route: a Sortr admin will look at the photographs and location record for the booking and the customer's account, and where the task was in fact performed the strike is disregarded — it stops counting toward the 3-in-14 rule and toward your reliability score. Running out of time to press a button is not the same as not doing the job. Sortr cannot currently pay you for that booking: the customer's payment is released when a booking ends this way, so there is nothing held to pay out. If this happens to you, raise it — Sortr treats it as a fault in its own timing, not yours.

What never counts as a no-show. Declining a job offer (§3), using away mode (§8), and ignoring a "work near you" nudge can never produce a strike — you accepted nothing, so there was nothing to be late for. Nor can a booking you cancelled or released: only running out of time is a strike. So where the customer caused it — wrong address, no access, they cancelled, they did not leave out what the task needs — or where you are standing down under §3A, cancel the booking before the time runs out, and pick the closest reason the app offers. If the clock beats you to it, the booking ends as a no-show and a strike is recorded; ask for it to be reviewed under Safeguards below.

What changed, and why you are being asked to accept it. Until this version, this section said that a customer-caused cancellation or a genuine emergency never counted, and said nothing about time at all. It now says what the times are, and it says what happens if a booking ends before you can cancel: those reasons still count for nothing, but you have to cancel before your time runs out, and if the booking ends first you have to ask for the strike to be disregarded rather than it happening by itself.

An emergency. If something genuinely serious stops you getting there or finishing — an accident, sudden illness, a family emergency, a disability or health reason affecting your journey — tell Sortr as soon as you reasonably can through the §10 route, and a Sortr admin will consider whether the strike should be disregarded. The same applies where it stopped the person you sent under §2 rather than you: their accident, sudden illness or emergency counts exactly as yours would. You do not need to ask permission in advance, and nothing is recorded about why.

Strikes and cooldowns. Each booking that ends this way counts as a strike, whether the arrive-by or the finish-by time was the one that ran out. If you accrue 3 strikes within any 14-day window, your ability to take new work is paused for 24 hours (an "accept-cooldown"). While a cooldown is running you cannot accept a new booking. You can still go online, you can still see the job feed, and you can carry on with any booking you had already accepted. A cooldown does not touch bookings you have already accepted — their arrive-by and finish-by times keep running, and this section still applies to them — does not touch money you have already earned, and is never shown to customers. A cooldown lapses by itself after 24 hours; nothing you do or fail to do extends it.

Reliability score and re-offer inclusion (a separate consequence). Separately from strikes and the accept-cooldown, an accept-then-drop (cancelling a booking after you had accepted it) and a booking that ended because you never arrived feed a reliability score and tier. A low ("watch") tier reduces the range of future offers you are included in: watch-tier Sorters are excluded from the re-offer of a booking. Existing accepted bookings, your payouts, and everything shown to customers are unaffected. This consequence:

• is fed only by those two things — never by declining an offer (§3), using away mode (§8), or ignoring a nudge — and a job you arrived at on a job for now or a job at a fixed time and did not finish in time is a strike, but does not feed this score;
• does not apply to new Sorters: until your work spans enough completed jobs and enough distinct customers to be scored, your tier is neutral, never a penalty;
• counts nothing until it is at least 24 hours old, so nothing you did today can move your tier today;
• is an automated decision you can contest through the §10 route; and
• is separate from the accept-cooldown above: you may be subject to the cooldown, the reliability re-offer exclusion, both, or neither.

Safeguards. When a booking of yours ends this way, Sortr sends you a notification naming the booking, telling you a strike has been recorded, and telling you how many you now have in the window. You may ask a Sortr admin to review the ending, the strike, or any cooldown at any time — whether or not a cooldown has been applied — through the §10 route. Where a cooldown is running, that review is expedited (target: within the cooldown period, not the standard 5-working-day queue). If the review upholds your representations, any cooldown is lifted and the strike is disregarded: it stops counting toward the 3-in-14 rule and toward your reliability score. The UK GDPR Article 22C safeguards at §10 apply. A strike stops counting 14 days after it was recorded.

If Sortr ever changes how these times are worked out, that is a change to this section — §14 applies, and it never affects a booking you have already accepted.

When this section starts to apply to you. This section applies to bookings you accept after you have accepted this version of these terms. A booking you accepted before then is governed by the version that applied to you when you accepted it. Until you accept this version, Sortr will not offer you new bookings — that is the §14 mechanism, and it is there so that no booking of yours is ever governed by a version of §11C you have not read.

If a task somehow has no expected time recorded against it, the allowance is 2 hours.

12. Termination

You may terminate this agreement at any time by deactivating your account.

Sortr may terminate this agreement:

• Immediately, if your KYC fails or remains unverified for more than 30 days
• Immediately, if you breach §11 (financial crime)
• Immediately, if Sortr knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that you are a designated person under UK financial-sanctions legislation (payouts freeze immediately under §11; the §10 representations route remains available)
• On 30 days' notice for any other reason, with a written summary of the reason

Termination does not affect amounts you have earned. Any deferred payout pending confirmation at termination is released once the relevant dispute window has closed (or the dispute is resolved), less any amount Sortr is entitled to recover under §6 or to withhold, reverse, or set off under §11A or §12A. The only exception is where release is prohibited by law (for example a sanctions asset-freeze under §11, or a lawful delay under §11B).

12A. Liability and indemnities

1. Sortr's liability to you is capped. Sortr's total liability to you arising in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of: (a) the platform fees Sortr earned from your completed bookings in that period, and (b) £1,000. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits Sortr's liability for death or personal injury caused by its negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

2. You indemnify Sortr against losses arising from:

• (a) a claim that you are a worker or employee of Sortr, to the extent the claim is caused by your own misrepresentation of your circumstances to Sortr — capped at the total amounts paid to you through the platform in the 12 months before the claim;
• (b) your, or your substitute's, negligence or wilful misconduct in performing a task, including damage to a customer's property or person (§2: you remain responsible for your substitute), and your substitute being under 18 or not being who you said they were (the §2.6 warranty);
• (c) your failure to account for your own tax or National Insurance (as allocated at §1A); and
• (d) content you upload to the platform infringing a third party's rights.

3. Express set-off authorisation. You expressly authorise Sortr to set off against your payouts only the following: amounts due under the §11A fraud-recovery remedies, dispute-driven payout reversals under §6/§7 (full on a concede or upheld dispute, proportional on a partial refund), the arrived-cancel compensation reversal (where a Sortr admin waives or refunds a customer's £3 arrived-cancel fee under §5, your £2.40 share of that fee is reversed in parity with the customer refund), the §1A tax reimbursement, and amounts due under the indemnities above. Every set-off is specific and itemised: Sortr will notify you in writing of each amount, the booking or event it relates to, and the provision relied on, before or at the time of the deduction. No set-off reduces any single payout by more than 50% of that payout — save that the reversal of a disputed booking's own still-held payout (§6), and the parity reversal of a booking's own still-held £2.40 arrived-cancel compensation, are each a reversal of the same booking's own amount before it leaves the platform rather than a deduction from a different payout, and so are not subject to that cap (an already-released £2.40 clawed back from a future payout is a genuine set-off and remains subject to the cap, exactly as an already-released dispute reversal is). This authorisation does not extend to ordinary negative balances, which are governed exclusively by §6 (no netting).

4. Statutory rights savings. Nothing in these terms excludes, limits, or requires you to give up any statutory right that cannot lawfully be excluded by agreement (including, if a court or tribunal were ever to find you have them notwithstanding §1, any rights under the Employment Rights Act 1996 — see s.203).

13. Governing law

This agreement is governed by the laws of England and Wales.

For disputes you have with Sortr (not with customers — those are covered at §7), the route is:

1. Internal review — the §7 dispute process and the §10 representations + human-review route;
2. Without-prejudice negotiation between you and Sortr;
3. Mediation through a commercial mediation scheme that accepts micro-business and sole-trader disputes (e.g. CEDR commercial mediation), with the costs split equally; then
4. The courts of England and Wales.

14. Changes to these terms, notices, and assignment

Variation. Sortr may propose changes to these terms on at least 14 days' written notice to you.

• Non-material changes (for example corrections, clarifications, or changes that do not reduce your rights or increase your obligations) take effect on the date stated in the notice. If you do not wish to continue under the changed terms, you may deactivate your account at any time before that date without penalty (§12).
• Material changes — any change touching §1 (your status and what Sortr does and does not require of you), §2 (substitution — sending someone else to do a job you have accepted), §4 (pricing and earnings floors), §5 (payout schedule), §6 (negative balance), §11A (suspected-fraud remedies), §11C (arrival and finishing times, no-show strikes and cooldowns), or §12A (liability, indemnities, and set-off), and any other change that reduces a right or adds an obligation — do not bind you unless and until you expressly accept them in-app. Until you accept, the previous version continues to apply to you; Sortr may make continued access to new job offers conditional on acceptance, but never your access to amounts you have already earned. A change that touches a listed section but only corrects an inaccuracy, widens an exemption in your favour, or adds to what you receive — without reducing any right or adding any obligation — is a non-material change under the first bullet.
• Earned amounts. Amounts you have earned are always governed by the version of these terms in force when you accepted the booking concerned.

Notices. Sortr gives you valid written notice in-app and by email to the address registered on your account. You give Sortr valid written notice through the in-app routes described in these terms (including the §10 representations form) or by email to legal@sortr.uk. A notice from Sortr is deemed received when its delivery is confirmed by push acknowledgement, email-open, or SMS delivery receipt (the same confirmed-delivery mechanic as §7); where no confirmation arrives within 96 hours, a human Sortr admin confirms deemed-delivery before any clock dependent on the notice starts.

Assignment. Your account and this agreement are personal to you and may not be assigned or transferred (this does not limit your §2 substitution right, which concerns performance of a task, not this agreement). Sortr may assign this agreement to a member of its corporate group, or to a purchaser of its business, on written notice to you; the assignee must honour amounts you have earned and the version of these terms then applying to you.