Deliverable Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance criteria are the specific, testable conditions a deliverable must meet before the client is obligated to accept it and payment is triggered.
In short
- Defines exactly what "done" means for a deliverable, not just what the deliverable is.
- Should be testable -- pass/fail, not subjective judgment calls.
- Directly tied to payment milestones in most SOWs.
- The single most common gap that lets scope creep and payment disputes happen.
What good acceptance criteria look like
Instead of "the platform will be tested," good acceptance criteria state "the platform passes UAT with zero critical defects and 99.9% uptime over a 30-day hypercare window." The difference is testability -- either the condition was met or it wasn't, with no room for one party to argue it depending on interpretation.
What happens when they're missing
Without defined acceptance criteria, a deliverable can be technically complete by the vendor's standard and still get rejected by the client's, with no contractual basis to resolve the disagreement. That ambiguity is exactly where payment gets withheld, timelines slip, and relationships sour.
How ScopeWise checks this
ScopeWise's Scope agent explicitly extracts whether acceptance criteria are present for each deliverable, quotes the criteria text when it exists, and flags missing acceptance criteria as a finding -- one of its highest-confidence risk categories since it's based on explicit absence, not inference.