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name: wedding-vendor-contract-decoder description: "Decode a wedding vendor contract — venue, photographer, caterer, band — before signing: deposits and their refundability, cancellation and postponement terms, the substitute-performer and force-majeure clauses, and overtime math. Use when someone asks review this venue contract, is this photographer contract normal, what if we have to postpone, or decode this caterer agreement. Produces a clause decode with 🔴🟡🟢 severity, the cancellation-cost timeline, the questions to ask this vendor, and what's actually negotiable."

Wedding Vendor Contract Decoder Skill

Wedding contracts are signed in the happiest possible mood about the least happy possible clauses — what happens if someone cancels, postpones, no-shows, or sends a substitute. And the money is structured backwards from consumer intuition: deposits are usually retainers (often non-refundable by design — the vendor turned away other bookings for your date), while the cancellation timeline decides whether a change of plans costs 20% or 100%. This skill decodes the clauses that bite, computes the walk-away cost at each date, and lists what vendors routinely amend when asked before signing.

What This Skill Produces

• A clause-by-clause decode with 🔴🟡🟢 severity, wedding-specific
• The cancellation-cost timeline — what backing out costs at each milestone date, computed from the contract's own schedule
• The questions for this vendor — targeted at the contract's silences
• What's actually negotiable — the amendments vendors commonly accept pre-signature

Required Inputs

Ask for these only if they aren't already provided:

• The contract text — pasted or transcribed; decode what's there and name the missing standard clauses (a contract's silences are findings — no postponement clause is itself the postponement policy)
• The vendor type and the money — total, deposit, payment schedule; vendor types have different signature risks (venue: minimums and vendor-lockins · photographer: substitute and delivery terms · caterer: per-head true-up dates · band/DJ: overtime and substitute)
• The couple's realistic risks — deployment-prone job? Health situations? A date that might move? The decode weights what's likely for them

Framework: Severity Scale

• 🔴 Can cost you real money — cancellation schedules that jump to 100% early (quote the dates, compute the timeline), postponement treated as cancellation (the clause that hurt everyone in living memory — date-change terms deserve their own paragraph and often don't have one), guest-count minimums with full-price true-ups, "substitute performer/photographer at our discretion" with no approval or refund rights, overtime rates unstated or extreme, force-majeure that excuses only the vendor, auto-forfeiture of everything paid regardless of timing or resale of the date.
• 🟡 Unusual — clarify before signing — delivery timelines for photos/video absent ("sneak peek in 2 weeks, gallery by [date]" belongs in writing), exclusive-vendor requirements and their corkage/cake-cutting fee schedule, meal/break riders, image-rights clauses (who can publish the photos where), setup/teardown windows that don't match the venue's.
• 🟢 Standard — retainer non-refundability itself (industry-normal — the schedule is the fight, not the retainer), service-charge line items disclosed up front, standard liability language; label them so the couple fights the right battles.

Always compute the walk-away table: for each contract milestone date, the cost of cancelling that day (deposit + scheduled payments + any penalty), and the same for a date change if the contract distinguishes — because "what does changing the date cost in March?" is the question the contract was designed not to answer plainly.

Output Format

Vendor Contract Decode: [vendor type — total]

1. The verdict — sign / amend these clauses first / keep shopping, in two sentences.

2. Clause decode

Clause (§)	What it says	What it means for your wedding	Severity

3. 💸 The walk-away table — per milestone date: cancellation cost · date-change cost (or "contract is silent — that's question #1").

4. Questions for the vendor — 4–6, aimed at the silences: postponement terms, substitute policy, overtime rate in writing, delivery dates, what happens if they cancel.

5. What's negotiable — date-change addendum (the most-granted ask in the industry), delivery deadlines, overtime caps, substitute-approval rights, payment-schedule shifts.

End the artifact with, verbatim: "This is a plain-language reading, not legal/financial advice — laws vary by jurisdiction; confirm anything load-bearing with a qualified professional."

Quality Checks

• The walk-away table is computed from the contract's actual schedule, per date
• Postponement-vs-cancellation treatment is explicitly determined or flagged as silent
• Missing standard clauses are named as findings, not skipped
• Retainer non-refundability is decoded as normal while the schedule gets the scrutiny
• The disclaimer line appears verbatim in the artifact

Anti-Patterns

• Do not fight the retainer's existence — industry-standard; the escalation schedule is where money moves
• Do not assume postponement ≠ cancellation — unless the contract says so, it doesn't
• Do not invent clauses that aren't in the document — silences get questions, not assumptions
• Do not skip the vendor-cancels-you direction — their force majeure needs a your-money answer
• Do not present jurisdiction-dependent consumer protections as universal — flag and refer out

Based On

Client-side event-contract review — cancellation-schedule math, postponement-clause triage, silence auditing.

Example Trigger Phrases

• "Review this venue contract."
• "Is this photographer contract normal?"
• "What if we have to postpone?"
• "Decode this caterer agreement."