Terms of service.

Cooper is a platform that matches hospitality workers to shifts with employers. We are the platform, not your employer: the contract for any shift you take is between you and the business that hired you.

You need an account to apply for shifts. You must be old enough to work in the role you apply for, give us accurate information, and keep your login to yourself. Tell us if you think someone else has access to it.

We rank open roles against your profile - your availability, your travel radius, your pay floor and your experience. Being matched to a role is not an offer of work, and being shortlisted is not a guarantee of an interview. The hiring decision belongs to the employer.

Turn up to shifts you accept, or tell the employer as early as you can if you can't. Don't misrepresent your experience or your right to work. Don't use Cooper to harass anyone or to advertise anything other than genuine work.

Rates are set by the employer and shown on the role before you apply. Hours are recorded on a timesheet, approved by the employer, and paid at the frequency stated on the role. Cooper is not responsible for an employer's failure to pay, but we will help you chase it.

When you publish a job on Cooper, we publish a public version of the advert and make it available to Google Jobs and other search engines as standard. This helps the role reach people who are not yet using Cooper. Applications still come through Cooper.

You can turn public advertising off manually in your company profile settings. Jobs will then remain available to candidates on Cooper but will not be made available publicly by us. You can change this setting at any time.

Search engines control whether and when an eligible advert appears in their results, so Cooper cannot guarantee that Google or another search engine will index or display a particular job.

If you hire through Cooper, you pay us a platform fee. It is charged to your business, monthly, in arrears, and it is calculated from the hours worked by the people you hired through us. There is no subscription, no joining fee and nothing to pay in a month where nobody worked.

The fee for a month is the total of:

• £1.75 for each hour worked, whatever the role or the rate.
• A share of the wage bill - the hours worked multiplied by their rates. The share steps down as the month grows and is applied band by band, so an hour is charged at the rate for the band it falls in: 9.5% on the first 120 hours, 7.5% on hours 120 to 350, 6.5% on hours 350 to 800, and 4.5% on above 800 hours.
• £0.25 for each hour worked on an urgently posted role - one published less than 48 hours before its first shift. This applies to every hour of that role, for as long as it runs, and whether a role counts is decided when you publish it and does not change afterwards. You are told before you publish.
• £0.20 for the invoice, once per invoice regardless of how it is paid or how many times payment is attempted.

Fees are exclusive of VAT, which is added at the prevailing rate. Your Billing page shows the month building up, itemised the same way, before it is invoiced.

Our fee depends on how many hours were worked, so we need to know what they were. Approving a timesheet each week is how you tell us, and it is also how the person who worked gets paid.

Where a week has not been signed off by the time we invoice, we will calculate that week from the schedule you published for the role - the days and shift times you posted, or the weekly hours if you did not give times - and bill it as though every one of those shifts was worked. These are “deemed hours”. Where you have saved a timesheet without approving it, we use your saved figures instead, because they are closer to what happened than our schedule is.

Deemed hours are final once the month has been invoiced. Approving that week afterwards will not change the invoice, and we will not issue a credit for it. This is what lets us bill and pay on a predictable monthly cycle rather than reopening closed months, and it is why we go to some length to warn you first.

Before any week is deemed, all of the following will have happened:

• You will have been emailed during the week the hours were worked, and again once the week went unsigned.
• You will have been emailed on each of the three days before the invoice date, naming the month and the date it bills.
• Your Billing page will have listed every week we intend to deem, the hours we intend to charge for it, where that figure came from, and a link to sign the week off instead.

We invoice a month on the 4th of the following month. Up to that point you can change any week by approving it with the hours that were actually worked, including none.

We do not deem hours for someone who never started. Where an engagement is recorded as a no-show, we bill only hours you have recorded on a timesheet, never an estimate.

Invoices are charged automatically to the payment method you have saved with us, on the day they are issued. Card details are held by our payment processor, Stripe, and never by us.

If you have no payment method saved, we will still issue the invoice and it becomes payable within 14 days. If a payment fails we will retry it and tell you, and we may pause your ability to post new roles until it clears.

If you think an invoice is wrong, tell us within 30 days of its date. Your Billing page keeps a record of every hour we charged for, which week it belonged to and where the figure came from, so we can go through it with you.

When someone stops working for you, mark the engagement as complete. We stop billing for a placement from the date it is closed out, so an engagement left open may continue to be deemed from its published schedule. Closing it out promptly is the only way we can know.

You can close your account at any time. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we'll tell you why when we do. Closing an account doesn't cancel a shift you've already agreed to, and it doesn't cancel fees already owed for hours worked.

We work to keep Cooper accurate and available, but we don't promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we don't vet every detail an employer gives us. Nothing here limits liability that can't be limited by law.

If we change these terms in a way that affects you, we'll tell you before the change takes effect. Carrying on using Cooper after that means you accept the new version. If we change our fees, we will tell you at least one full billing month ahead, and the change will never apply to a month already in progress.

Questions about these terms, or about anything on your account, can go to our support team and we'll come back to you.