Terms of Use

These terms are the agreement between you and Rationale Services for your use of https://rationaleservices.com. Read them before you use the site. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

1. Accepting these terms

You accept these terms when you browse the site, submit a form, book an appointment or otherwise use any feature. You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter a binding contract. If you use the site for a company, you confirm that you have authority to bind that company, and "you" then means both you and the company.

2. The site does not create a professional relationship

Using this site does not make you our client. Reading a page, downloading a guide, sending a contact form, booking a call or emailing us does not create an accountant-client, attorney-client or fiduciary relationship with Rationale Services.

A professional relationship begins only when we have signed a written engagement letter with you that describes the scope of the work, and any condition that letter sets before work starts has been met.

Until then, we owe you no duty to act, to advise, to meet a filing deadline or to keep information confidential beyond the privacy commitments in our Privacy Policy. We may decline any prospective engagement for any lawful reason.

What an engagement covers is set by that letter, not by this site. Our work is accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, tax return preparation and filing, and business-licensing paperwork. We do not perform audits, reviews, compilations or any other attest engagement, we do not produce formal business valuations, and we do not act for you before a tax authority.

3. No professional advice

Everything on this site is general information. It is not accounting, tax, payroll, legal, investment or business advice, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own situation. Do not act, or decide not to act, based only on what you read here. Speak to a qualified professional about your facts first.

4. Accuracy and currency

We try to keep the site accurate, but the rules that affect the work we do change often, sometimes with retroactive effect. Nothing on this site tells you what a rule requires of you, when anything of yours is due, or what a government process involves.

Content on this site is accurate only as of the date it was written. We have no duty to update any page. A page with no date should be treated as potentially out of date. We make no representation that the site is free of errors or omissions.

5. Permitted use

You may view, browse and print pages of this site for your own personal or internal business use, and you may contact us about our services. That is the full extent of the permission we give.

6. Prohibited conduct

You agree not to:

1. Scrape, harvest, crawl or copy the site other than as described in section 7, or extract data in bulk.
2. Reverse engineer, decompile or try to derive the source code of any part of the site.
3. Overload, flood, stress-test or otherwise interfere with the site's operation or its hosting infrastructure.
4. Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any account, server, portal or network connected to the site.
5. Probe or scan for vulnerabilities, or bypass any security or access control.
6. Impersonate any person or organization, or misrepresent who you are or who you represent.
7. Upload or transmit malware, viruses, scripts or any code intended to damage or disrupt.
8. Submit another person's personal, financial or tax information unless you are legally authorized to do so. If you submit a third party's information, you confirm you have that authority and will indemnify us for any claim that you did not.
9. Use the site to send unsolicited commercial messages, or to collect contact details for that purpose.
10. Use the site for any unlawful purpose, or in a way that infringes anyone's rights.
11. Remove, hide or alter any copyright, trademark or other proprietary notice.

7. Automated access and crawlers

We do allow well-behaved automated access. Search engine crawlers and AI crawlers that respect our robots.txt file are permitted to fetch and index public pages at a reasonable rate. Our robots.txt at https://rationaleservices.com/robots.txt states what is allowed and what is excluded, and it controls. Automated access that ignores robots.txt, requests pages at a rate that degrades service, or targets forms or logins is not permitted and we may block it.

8. Intellectual property

The site and its contents — text, layout, design, graphics, logos, photographs, checklists, guides, templates, code and the arrangement of all of it — belong to Rationale Services or to our licensors, and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. "Rationale Services" and our logo are our marks.

We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to access the site and to display its pages on your device for the permitted use in section 5. That licence grants no right to republish, redistribute, sell, licence, frame, mirror, create derivative works from or commercially exploit any part of the site. All rights we do not expressly grant are reserved.

9. What you send us

You keep ownership of the content you send us through the site — form messages, documents, files and feedback. By sending it, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy and use that content for the purposes of responding to you, evaluating and performing the engagement, and meeting our legal duties. That licence lasts as long as our retention schedule requires.

You confirm that what you send is accurate, that you have the right to send it, and that it does not infringe anyone's rights or contain malicious code. We may remove or refuse any submission.

Unsolicited ideas, suggestions and feedback about our services are treated as non-confidential. We may use them without obligation or payment to you.

10. Communications and confidentiality warning

Do not send sensitive information by ordinary email. Standard email is not encrypted end to end. It passes through servers we do not control, it can be intercepted, and it can be delivered to the wrong address by a single typing error.

Never send the following by email or through a website form:

• Social Security numbers or other taxpayer identification numbers
• Bank account or routing numbers
• Credit or debit card numbers
• Payroll files containing employee identifiers
• Scans of driver's licences, passports or immigration documents

Instead, call us on +1 (470) 359-5949 and we will tell you how to send the material safely, or deliver it in person or by mail to our Norcross office.

If you send sensitive information by email anyway, you accept the risk of interception or misdelivery. We will move the material into secure storage when we receive it, but we cannot undo exposure that has already happened.

Email and web forms are also not the way to meet a deadline. Do not assume we have received or read a message until we confirm it. For anything time-sensitive, call us.

11. Appointments and payment

Appointment requests made through the site are requests, not confirmed bookings. An appointment is booked only when we confirm it by email, text or phone.

Fees, invoicing and payment are set in your signed engagement letter, not on this site. This site publishes no fees, rates, ranges or service packages, and nothing on it is an offer or a quote. Invoicing and payment timing, any amount payable in advance, late balances, refunds, charges for a missed or late-cancelled appointment, whether work may pause while an invoice is unpaid, and who bears government filing charges and penalties are all governed by that letter.

12. Availability and maintenance

We aim to keep the site available, but we do not promise uninterrupted or error-free access. The site may be unavailable for maintenance, updates, hosting problems, network failures or events beyond our control. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the site at any time, with or without notice.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The site is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

In plain words: we do not promise that the site will always work, that it will be free of errors or interruptions, that its information is current or complete, that it will meet your needs, or that files you download will be free of harmful code. Scan what you download, and verify anything you plan to rely on.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Rationale Services and its owners, members, officers, employees and contractors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages arising from your use of the site. That includes lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost savings, missed deadlines, tax penalties or interest, loss of goodwill and business interruption, whether the claim is in contract, tort, strict liability, statute or otherwise, and whether or not we were warned the loss was possible.

This section limits liability for the site. Liability for professional services we actually perform under an engagement letter is governed by that letter, not by this section.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, including liability for fraud or for willful misconduct. Some states do not allow some of these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Rationale Services and its owners, members, officers, employees and contractors from any claim, loss, liability, penalty, cost or expense, including reasonable attorney's fees, arising from:

1. Your use of the site.
2. Your breach of these terms.
3. Information you submitted that was inaccurate, that you had no right to submit, or that belonged to a third party who had not authorized you.
4. Your infringement of anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights.

We may take over the defense of any such claim at our own expense, and you will cooperate with us if we do.

16. Suspending or ending your access

We may block or suspend your access to the site at any time, without notice, if we reasonably believe you have breached these terms or are placing the site or its users at risk. Sections that by their nature should survive — intellectual property, submissions, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnification, governing law and dispute resolution — survive after your access ends.

17. Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to section 18, you and we agree that the exclusive venue for any dispute is the state or federal courts located in or having jurisdiction over Gwinnett County, Georgia, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

18. Resolving disputes

We want to resolve problems quickly and cheaply. Before filing anything, follow these steps.

1. Notice and negotiation. Send a written description of the dispute and the outcome you want to office@rationaleservices.com or to our Norcross address. We will do the same if we have a dispute with you. Each side then has 30 days to try to resolve it in good faith, by phone or in person.
2. Mediation. If negotiation fails, the dispute goes to non-binding mediation in Gwinnett County, Georgia, before a mediator both sides accept. Each side pays its own costs and half of the mediator's fee.

If mediation fails, a dispute is heard in the courts named in section 17. These terms contain no arbitration clause, no class-action waiver and no jury-trial waiver. A term of that kind changes your legal rights in important ways — it limits appeal, limits discovery, and can restrict the remedies available — so none applies unless and until it appears in this section in plain terms.

Nothing in this section prevents either side from seeking an injunction or other emergency relief from a court to stop misuse of the site, a data breach or infringement of intellectual property.

19. Severability

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, that provision is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest stays in force.

20. Entire agreement

These terms, together with our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Disclaimer, are the entire agreement between you and us about your use of the site. They replace any earlier understanding about the site.

21. The engagement letter controls

If you are an engaged client and anything in these terms conflicts with your signed engagement letter, the engagement letter controls for that conflict. These terms continue to govern your use of the website itself.

22. Assignment

You may not assign or transfer these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of our practice.

23. Force majeure

Neither side is liable for a delay or failure caused by something outside its reasonable control, including natural disaster, fire, flood, severe weather, war, civil unrest, terrorism, epidemic, labor action, utility or internet failure, cyberattack, or a government or taxing authority action or system outage. This does not excuse your duty to pay amounts already owed.

24. Electronic signatures and records

You consent to do business with us electronically. Electronic signatures, electronic consents and electronic records have the same effect as handwritten signatures and paper records, and neither side will contest their validity on the ground that they are electronic. You may withdraw this consent by writing to us, but doing so may prevent us from delivering some services. Keep your own copies of anything you sign electronically.

25. Notices

Send legal notices to us at 6825 Jimmy Carter Blvd, Suite 1520, Norcross, GA 30071, USA, or to office@rationaleservices.com. We may give you notice by email to the address you gave us, by posting on the site, or by mail.

26. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The effective date at the top shows the current version. Changes take effect when posted, and your continued use of the site after that means you accept them. For a material change, we will post a visible notice on the site. If you do not accept a change, stop using the site.

27. Contact us

• Rationale Services
• 6825 Jimmy Carter Blvd, Suite 1520, Norcross, GA 30071, USA
• Phone: +1 (470) 359-5949
• Email: office@rationaleservices.com
• Website: https://rationaleservices.com