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 how you perform a task: it imposes no working methods, no supervision, no equipment requirements, no clothing requirements, and no obligation to accept work or attend at any particular time. Sortr does not provide tools, equipment, or training beyond the platform itself.

You are responsible for:

• Your own income tax + National Insurance (Sortr does not deduct PAYE)
• Your own working time + breaks (Sortr does not regulate when you accept work)

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 another adult to perform a booked task

You may, at any time before performance, arrange for another adult to perform a task you have accepted on your behalf. The substitute need not be registered with Sortr. The substitute need not be approved by Sortr. The substitute need not be approved by the customer.

You remain responsible for the substitute's performance. If the substitute fails to perform, performs poorly, causes damage, or breaches these terms, Sortr will treat the failure as if you had performed it. Disputes raised by the customer are addressed to you, not the substitute. Payment is made to your Sortr account, not the substitute's.

The substitute does not receive a Sortr account, a Sortr T&C interaction, or any platform-side onboarding by virtue of performing the substituted task. Their identity is not collected by Sortr.

You are not required to use this right. You are also not required to ask permission to use it. Sortr will inform the customer at booking that substitution is permitted.

Substitution is never penalised. Use of a substitute will never be treated as a negative factor in dispute scoring, fraud flagging, graduation, tier, or account standing.

Declaring a substitution. You may (and should) mark a booking as substituted in the app before or at performance. Declaring a substitution is a notification, not a request — Sortr's permission is neither needed nor given. On a declared-substitution job:

• The §7 in-app GPS photo and device checks are suppressed, or are satisfied by a photo taken on any device and uploaded through your account;
• The arrival location check (§8A) is bypassed; and
• The absence of an in-app GPS photo is treated as a neutral factor in any dispute — never as evidence against you.

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).

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 100% of any tip (§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.

Tips. Any tip a customer adds is passed to you in full — Sortr deducts no fee from tips. 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 customer cancels a booking after you have arrived (a "wasted trip"), Sortr may charge the customer a flat £3 arrived-cancel fee. Your 80% share of that fee — £2.40 — is passed to you as compensation for the wasted trip (Sortr keeps the remaining £0.60 as its 20% share). 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 is not yet live — it is built behind an OFF flag and is disclosed here so these terms cover it before it is ever enabled.

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 will tell you in-app when each of these conditions is met.

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 on your behalf through Stripe. Sortr's 20% platform fee is deducted from amounts 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 declared-substitution job (§2), the absence of an in-app GPS photo is a neutral factor.

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.

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 non-attendance at an accepted booking.

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). On a declared-substitution job (§2) the arrival check is bypassed.

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)

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 no-show conduct, counted over a window that looks only at terminals at least 24 hours after the booking was confirmed and only once your conduct spans at least 3 distinct customers. Declining an offer, away mode and ignored nudges are never inputs. New Sorters are exempt (until you have enough completed jobs and distinct customers to be scored, your tier is neutral — never a penalty). A "watch" tier reduces the range of future offers you are included in (the §11C re-offer exclusion); it never touches existing accepted bookings or your payouts.

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.

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. No-shows — strikes and accept-cooldowns

Each booking you accept is a separate contract between you and that customer. Failing to attend an accepted booking without cancelling in advance (a "no-show") breaks that contract and harms the customer in a way that declining an offer never does.

What counts as a no-show: failure to attend an ACCEPTED booking without advance cancellation, including arriving and abandoning the task. What never counts: declining a job offer (§3), using away mode (§8), a cancellation caused by the customer (wrong address, no access, customer cancellation), or a genuine emergency you tell Sortr about as soon as reasonably possible.

Strikes and cooldowns. Each no-show is a strike. If you accrue 3 strikes within any 14-day window, your ability to accept new bookings is paused for 24 hours (an "accept-cooldown"). Existing accepted bookings are unaffected, your payouts are unaffected, and nothing is shown to customers.

Reliability score and re-offer inclusion (a separate consequence). Separately from strikes and the accept-cooldown, the same two kinds of conduct — an accept-then-drop (cancelling a booking after you had accepted it) and a no-show — 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 accept-then-drop and no-show conduct — never by declining an offer (§3), using away mode (§8), or ignoring a nudge;
• does not apply to new Sorters (a new-Sorter exemption applies until you have enough completed jobs and distinct customers to be scored — until then your tier is neutral, never a penalty);
• is an automated decision you can contest through the §10 route (§10 describes the tier logic and the human-review contest path); and
• is separate from the accept-cooldown above: you may be subject to the cooldown, the reliability re-offer exclusion, both, or neither.

Safeguards. You receive written notice of each strike when it is recorded, identifying the booking it relates to. If a third strike within the window triggers a cooldown, the cooldown may apply immediately. You may at any time request human review of a strike or a cooldown through the §10 route; a Sortr admin with authority to lift the cooldown will review your representations on an expedited basis (target: within the cooldown period, not the standard 5-working-day queue). If the review upholds your representations, the cooldown is lifted and the underlying strike is removed from your record. The UK GDPR Article 22C safeguards at §10 apply. Strikes lapse as the 14-day window rolls forward.

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);
• (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 §4 (pricing and earnings floors), §5 (payout schedule), §6 (negative balance), §11A (suspected-fraud remedies), §11C (no-show strikes and cooldowns), or §12A (liability, indemnities, and set-off) — 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.
• 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.