Writing and publishing a service

Everything you sell is a service, edited on one form at Services. New ones start at Add a service.

A draft is invisible

A service is not published until you publish it. Until then it is absent from the catalogue, from search and from every list. There is no "coming soon" state, so what a school sees is what a school can buy.

Publishing is one switch and it takes effect immediately. Unpublishing works the same way and does not affect anybody already holding it.

What the form asks for

• Type. Annual SLA, Consultancy, Training Course, Physical Product or Digital Asset. It decides how the item behaves, not just how it is labelled. See the catalogue.
• Service area. Which of your areas it belongs to. It drives the area page, the contacts shown beside it and the reporting.
• Title, summary and description. The summary is the line in a list; write it as a sentence about what the school gets.
• Code. Your own reference for it. It appears on orders and in exports.
• Price. See setting a price.
• Eligibility. Phase, organisation type, in or out of borough.
• Finance coding. The cost centre and account the income goes to. Wrong here means a reconciliation problem later, so it is worth checking with finance once rather than guessing forty times.
• A picture. Upload one or choose from the library.

Writing the description

Three things a business manager wants and often does not get: what is actually included, what is explicitly not, and what happens when they need you urgently. A description that answers those produces fewer quotes and fewer telephone calls than one that describes the team.

Eligibility, said out loud

Where a school is not eligible, the catalogue page says so and says why rather than hiding the item. "We do not sell this to academies" and "we have not written this yet" are very different answers, and a business manager planning a budget needs to be able to tell them apart.

Related services

You can point a service at others that go with it. They appear on its page as suggestions, which is the honest version of upselling: the school decides.

Reserved content

A service can be what unlocks reserved guidance, documents or e-learning. Point the article or document at the service and the entitlement follows automatically for anybody holding it. See news, guidance, documents and pages.

Prices for next year

Change the price when you know it, before renewal invitations go out sixty days ahead of the year end. That price is what a school sees on its invitation beside what it paid this year, so the figure being right at that moment is what makes a renewal a decision rather than a query.