A practice management system can sit at the centre of almost every veterinary workflow.
Appointments. Clinical notes. Prescriptions. Billing. Client communications. Laboratory results. Stock. Reporting.
When it goes down, the practical impact can be immediate.
Yet the contractual remedy for failure can be far smaller than the operational dependency suggests.
That does not mean software suppliers should accept unlimited liability. No sensible SaaS business could do that.
It does mean practices should understand the gap between a supplier's uptime marketing and what the contract actually promises.
Provet: 99.9% is a target, not the standard remedy
Provet's public terms say it seeks to achieve 99.9% availability.
But the same section says Provet has no liability merely for failing to meet that availability target. The terms contemplate a separate Service Level Agreement for customers that want additional availability commitments, potentially for an additional fee.
Source: Provet Terms of Service, section 6.4
That is an important procurement distinction.
"We target 99.9% uptime" is not the same as "we contractually guarantee 99.9% uptime with a defined remedy if we miss it."
Practices should ask which one they are actually buying.
Provet's standard liability cap is also unusually low
Under Provet's current standard terms, aggregate liability is capped by reference to the first three months of Subscription Charges, subject to the usual categories of liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.
The terms also exclude various categories of loss, including loss or damage to data.
Source: Provet Terms of Service, section 19
For a low-cost cloud subscription, a three-month-fee cap can be a small amount compared with the value of the operations depending on the platform.
That does not make the clause unlawful or uniquely unusual in SaaS.
It does make it commercially important.
Merlin: the lower of 12 months' licence fees or £20,000
Merlin's terms contain another striking cap.
Subject to its exceptions, MWI's aggregate liability is capped at the lower of the licence fees paid in the preceding 12 months and £20,000.
The same limitation section excludes categories including loss or corruption of data.
Source: Merlin Terms and Conditions, clause 14.4
A £20,000 ceiling may look substantial in isolation.
For a multi-site veterinary business whose clinical and financial operations rely on the PMS, the practice should still ask whether that allocation of risk is acceptable.
Covetrus EMEA: a larger ceiling, but a short claim-notification period
The public Covetrus EMEA Master Service Terms use a different structure.
They exclude categories including loss or corruption of data and cap total liability at the lower of the annual fees paid for the Technology Services during the preceding 12 months or £500,000.
More unusually, the same section says Covetrus has no liability unless the customer serves written notice within two months of becoming aware, or when it ought reasonably to have become aware, of the circumstances giving rise to liability.
Source: Covetrus EMEA Master Service Terms v6, clause 13
A practice may naturally assume normal statutory limitation periods tell it how long it has to pursue a contractual problem.
A much shorter contractual notification requirement is therefore something procurement teams should identify before an incident occurs.
IDEXX: restoration from backup as the main data-loss remedy
IDEXX's general software terms take a particularly relevant approach to data loss.
Where Customer Data is lost or damaged, the terms make IDEXX's commercially reasonable efforts to restore from the latest available backup the stated remedy, while also saying successful restoration is not guaranteed.
Source: IDEXX Software Offering General Terms, section 4.3
Backups are obviously essential.
But a practice should know what happens if the latest backup is incomplete, old or cannot be restored.
The contract may allocate far more of that operational risk to the customer than the sales process makes obvious.
Vetspire uses service credits
Vetspire publishes a more conventional service-credit mechanism.
Its SLA provides credits for qualifying downtime, subject to conditions and notice requirements. Credits are capped and are not cash payments; the agreement describes them as the sole and exclusive remedy for the relevant SLA failure.
Source: Vetspire Terms & Conditions, Service Level Agreement
Service credits are common in cloud software.
But a credit against next month's subscription may be economically tiny compared with the cost of a day in which a hospital cannot access core workflows.
Again, that does not mean suppliers should insure every possible business loss.
It means a practice should understand what the SLA actually buys.
Shepherd: liability linked to 12 months of fees
Shepherd's published EULA generally limits liability by reference to 12 months of fees, subject to its exclusions and applicable law.
Source: Shepherd Service Agreement / EULA, limitation-of-liability provisions
That is a more conventional SaaS structure than a cap based on only three months of charges.
It also makes direct comparison possible: two suppliers can sell similarly critical products while accepting materially different levels of contractual exposure.
Why suppliers limit liability
There is a legitimate reason these clauses exist.
A PMS might cost a practice a few hundred or a few thousand pounds per month while being connected to a business worth millions.
If every outage created unlimited liability for all lost revenue, consequential loss, reputational damage and clinical disruption, the supplier's risk could be almost unlimited relative to its fee.
Insurance costs would rise and software prices would follow.
So the sensible position is not "liability caps are bad".
The question is whether the allocation is proportionate and transparent.
Seven questions for your PMS supplier
Before signing, ask the following. The Freedom Test in part 8 adds the commercial questions around them.
- What uptime level is contractually guaranteed?
- What counts as excluded downtime?
- What remedy applies when the supplier misses the target?
- Is a service credit the sole remedy?
- What is the total liability cap?
- Is loss or corruption of data excluded?
- Is there a special deadline for notifying the supplier of a claim?
Then ask one operational question:
What would we actually do for six hours if the PMS disappeared?
A good contingency plan can matter more than the damages clause after the event.
Buy the contract as well as the software
Most PMS demonstrations focus on what happens when everything works.
Contracts tell you who carries the loss when it does not.
Both matter.
Practices should not expect unlimited guarantees from software suppliers.
But if the PMS will become the operating system for the clinic, it is reasonable to understand exactly how much responsibility the supplier accepts when that operating system fails.
Contract analysis, not legal advice. Liability limitations can be affected by applicable law and individual negotiated terms. Sources reviewed on 2026-08-20.