A system for providing granular functionality called web services to commercial customers includes among other things a client to issue service requests and receive responses, a web server configured to accept and process service requests, and a means of accounting for usage. The current art specifies standards for functional interactions between web service clients and servers. A set of commercial extensions are defined herein to enable maintenance interactions. This “maintenance protocol” includes operations such as client software that is self-updating in response to server changes and the capability of reconciling client usage logs with service provider invoicing.