The word "comprehensive" is printed on the front of the lift contract. The details of the coverage are listed in the exclusions at the back. Both parts are the contract; only one of them is read.
This guide is about the back pages. Not because contracts with exclusions are bad contracts, but because the gap between what a committee believes is covered and what is actually written down is where most billing surprises live.
Parts that are out of production
In many contracts, when a part is no longer manufactured, coverage of the component it belongs to changes or ends. For an older lift this can quietly hollow out the word comprehensive, because the components most likely to fail are precisely the ones whose parts are hardest to find.
If your lift is more than fifteen years old, it is worth asking your contractor in writing which components, if any, currently fall under this clause. The answer belongs in the building's records, and it feeds directly into replacement planning.
“Beyond economic repair”
Some contracts release the contractor from repairing a component once it is beyond economic repair. The phrase sounds objective. It is not. Who decides what is economic? Usually not you. The clause is workable when the contract says how the decision is made and what evidence supports it, and worth querying when it is simply declared.
Misuse and vandalism
Excluding misuse and vandalism is reasonable. A lift is not broken by being used properly, and no maintenance fee prices in a kicked door. The thing to watch is drift: reasonable exclusions applied broadly, until every door fault is classified as misuse. The service docket states the cause the technician found. If door faults keep arriving as chargeable misuse, the dockets are where the pattern shows, which is one more reason to keep them.
Consumables and adjustments
Small items, billed frequently, which accumulate over time. Individually none of them justifies a query; annually they can add up to a meaningful share of lift spend. Total them once a year. A number that is invisible per invoice becomes very visible per year, and a contract that excludes many consumables should be priced accordingly at the next renewal or tender.
Read the exclusions first
None of this makes a contract invalid. All contracts include exclusions, and a reasonable contract prices them honestly. A cheaper fee with wide exclusions and a dearer fee with narrow ones can be the same deal wearing different clothes; the exclusions are how you tell.
So read the exclusions first. They are shorter than the contract, and the invoices are based on them.
The Lift Savings Report puts independent eyes on one building's lift contract and last three invoices, free. Findings within three business days, every flagged dollar quoted to the exact clause.
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