If you run a municipal course, your tee sheet and point-of-service systems are not a hobby—they’re the backbone of rounds, revenue, and weekend sanity. This article gives plain-language RFP clauses and short explanations you can paste into a solicitation to get real commitments on uptime, monitoring, support SLAs, and transition planning.
How to use these clauses
Treat the language below as templates. Adjust timeframes and thresholds to fit your course’s peak hours and tolerance for downtime. Where I suggest a response time or availability goal, you can tighten or relax it depending on local needs and budget.
Definitions (start here so everyone’s on the same page)
Include concise definitions for terms used in the RFP. Example:
“Uptime” — the percentage of time the Service is available to users during a monthly measurement period, excluding scheduled maintenance and disruptions caused by the Municipality, network outages beyond Vendor control, or force majeure events.
“Incident” — any event that interrupts or degrades the normal operation of the Service as measured by the agreed monitoring metrics.
Uptime SLA (template clause)
“Vendor shall provide an availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the Software as a Service (SaaS) components used by the Municipality. At minimum, the Vendor must guarantee monthly availability of [insert target, e.g., 99.9%] measured using the Vendor’s monitoring systems and reported as described in the Reporting section. Scheduled maintenance windows shall be excluded from uptime calculations when notified according to the Maintenance Windows clause.”
Note: 99.9% is a common starting point; adjust to your needs. Whatever number you pick, require a clear measurement method and exclusions.
How uptime is measured
“Uptime shall be calculated as: (Total minutes in measurement period – Minutes of Unavailable Service) / Total minutes in measurement period. Vendor shall publish the raw measurement data and calculation for each monthly period.”
Monitoring and public status
“Vendor must provide continuous monitoring of core service components (tee-sheet booking, user authentication, payment tokenization endpoints where used, and staff control panel). Vendor shall operate a public status page with real-time incident postings and historical uptime for the preceding 12 months. The status page must include ETA and progress updates for all incidents classified as Severity 1 or 2.”
Require ticketing integration or an API if you want incidents to automatically create records in your own systems.
Incident severity, response, and escalation (template)
“Vendor shall classify incidents by severity and meet the following response and update cadence:
- Severity 1 (Service Down): Vendor acknowledges within 15–30 minutes, begins mitigation within 1 hour, and provides updates at least every 30 minutes until service is restored.
- Severity 2 (Major Degradation): Vendor acknowledges within 1 hour, provides mitigation plan within 4 hours, and updates every 2 hours until resolved.
- Severity 3 (Partial Impact): Vendor acknowledges within 4 business hours and provides resolution or workaround within 48 hours.
Vendor must supply a written escalation matrix with names, roles, and 24/7 contact methods for personnel responsible for Severity 1 events.”
These are template times—your municipality can shorten them for busy weekends or tournaments.
Maintenance windows and notifications
“Vendor shall schedule routine maintenance outside of the Municipality’s peak hours (defined as [insert local peak times]). For non-emergency maintenance, Vendor must provide at least 72 hours written notice specifying expected impact and rollback plan. Emergency maintenance is permitted only when necessary to prevent imminent threat; Vendor must notify the Municipality as soon as practicable and document the reason in post-incident reporting.”
Support, staffing, and business hours
“Vendor shall provide support channels during these hours: [insert support hours]. For Severity 1 incidents, Vendor must maintain an on-call rotation accessible 24/7 via phone and email. Vendor shall provide municipal staff training materials, phone numbers, and a single designated technical account manager for the duration of the contract.”
Reporting, post-incident reviews, and KPIs
“Vendor must deliver a monthly performance report that includes: uptime percentage, number and classification of incidents, mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), mean time to repair (MTTR), and any SLA credits due. For any Severity 1 incident, Vendor must supply a written Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and corrective action plan within 10 business days of full resolution.”
Credits and remedies
“If monthly uptime falls below the SLA target, Vendor shall issue service credits per the following schedule: [insert credit schedule, e.g., X% credit per Y minutes below target]. Credits shall be the exclusive monetary remedy for availability failures unless repeated breaches occur (e.g., more than three months below SLA in a rolling 12-month period), at which point the Municipality reserves the right to terminate for cause after a reasonable cure period.”
Always include a defined cure period and a termination clause tied to repeated SLA failures.
Transition, data export, and rollback
“Vendor must provide a transition plan that includes: export of all municipal data in open, machine-readable formats (CSV and JSON), secure transfer procedures, and a parallel-run plan to validate data fidelity. Vendor must export transaction and booking history, active reservations, member records, and configuration settings within 10 business days of request. Vendor shall cooperate with a designated successor vendor to minimize downtime during cutover.”
Make sure the RFP requires that data exports are included at no extra charge and that exports include documentation of data formats.
Testing and acceptance
“Before go-live, Vendor shall run a joint acceptance test that includes functional checks and a peak-load simulation during a mutually agreed time. Acceptance criteria shall be documented; the Municipality may request remediation of issues discovered during acceptance testing before final acceptance.”
Audit and compliance
“Municipality reserves the right to require third-party verification of uptime and incident reporting once per contract year. Vendor shall cooperate and provide necessary logs and reports within 15 business days.”
Where to tighten or relax these templates
Smaller courses with limited budgets will accept longer response times or lower availability targets. For busy municipal courses, tournaments, or weekend-heavy schedules, tighten response times for Severity 1 events and require out-of-hours on-call support. If you want a deeper technical conversation about infrastructure and reducing outage risk, see our primer on failover and hosting options.
Related resources from Northpoint:
- Reducing outage risk during peak season: VPS hosting, failover, and operational protocols
- Migrating a tee sheet with minimal downtime: a 5-phase plan for courses
- How to test your tee-sheet booking speed: a simple checklist for pro shops
If you want RFP language tailored to your course’s schedule, peak-day needs, or payment-processor setup, talk with Northpoint about GolfSuite and what a practical SLA package would look like for your municipal operation. See whether Northpoint GolfSuite fits your course — Talk With Northpoint About GolfSuite.
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