Buying and booking
Your basket, and checking out part of it
The basket keeps itself between visits, and you never have to buy all of it at once.
On this page
The basket works the way a shop's does, with two differences that matter to a school: it keeps itself between visits, and you never have to buy all of it at once.
Adding things
Every catalogue page has an Add button. Quantities where a quantity makes sense; a start date where the item runs for a term. The basket shows a running total, net, VAT and gross, updated as you change it.
It persists
The basket belongs to your school rather than to your browser, so it survives signing out, a different computer and a fortnight of half term. That is deliberate: putting the year's buying together is a job that takes several sittings and often more than one person.
It follows from that that a colleague can see what you have put in it. If two of you are working on it at once, say so between you; the site will not stop you both.
Checking out part of it
At checkout you choose which lines to buy now. Everything you leave behind stays in the basket. That is the normal case rather than an edge one: the ICT agreement may be ready to go while the catering proposal is still with the governors.
What checkout asks for
- Your purchase order number, if your school uses them. It travels with the order all the way to the council's finance system and appears on the invoice, so it is worth getting right at this point rather than afterwards.
- The terms. You are shown the version of the terms in force today and asked to accept them. The version you accepted is stored against the order, so an order placed in 2026 is governed by the 2026 terms even after they are replaced.
If you do not have permission to spend
Committing spend is a permission of its own, separate from using the site, and it can carry a per-order cap. If what you are buying exceeds your cap, or you have no spending permission at all, checkout does not refuse you: it turns the order into a request and tells a School Admin.
Nothing is lost and nothing has to be typed again. When it is approved the order is placed as you built it. See permissions and spending caps and approvals.
A cap is per order, not per year
Worth knowing before you split an order to get under one: the cap is a limit on a single commitment, and it is set by your own School Admin rather than by City Council. If it is in the wrong place for the job you do, that is a thirty-second change on the people page.
After you press the button
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.