Buying and booking
What a price means
Four ways a price is worked out, why the number on roll matters, and how VAT is shown.
On this page
Prices are worked out in one of four ways. The catalogue page always shows which one applies and what the arithmetic was, because a price you cannot check is a price somebody will query by email.
The four ways
| Model | How the figure is reached |
|---|---|
| Fixed | One price, the same for every school. |
| Per pupil | A rate multiplied by your number on roll, usually with a floor and sometimes a ceiling. |
| Tiered | A price per phase or per size band: primary, secondary, special, all-through. |
| Quote | No list price. You ask, and a service lead answers with a figure and a date it holds until. See asking for a quote. |
Why the number on roll matters
Every per-pupil price on the site comes from one figure held against your school. The school that knows it is the one that sets it, on your school's details, and the site asks a School Admin to confirm it once each academic year.
Changing the roll applies to future pricing only. It never re-prices a contract you already hold, so correcting a figure in February does not produce a surprise adjustment against something bought in September. See confirming the roll.
VAT
Prices are shown net, with the VAT and the gross beside them, at every point where a number appears: the catalogue page, the basket, the checkout summary and the order. Nothing asks you to commit to a figure whose gross you have not been shown.
VAT is worked out line by line and rounded at the line, and an order total is the sum of its lines. That is not an implementation detail: it is what the council's finance system reconciles against, so a total worked out any other way would be a penny out and somebody would spend an afternoon on it.
Multi-year agreements
Some agreements run for more than one year, and the price for each year may differ. The contract page says which year of the term you are in — "year 3 of 5" — and what the next year costs, so the figure in a renewal invitation is never the first time you have seen it. See contracts and SLAs.
Where a price is wrong
If a figure looks wrong, the calculation on the page tells you where to look first: nine times out of ten it is the roll, and you can correct that yourself in under a minute. If it is not, ask in the bubble with the item's page open, so whoever answers is looking at the same screen you are.
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.