The Fee Calculator’s behaviour, appearance and email content is controlled from a single Calculator Settings record per school. This is where you tailor labels to match your school’s terminology, swap the default email text for something on-brand, and apply a CSS stylesheet to make the calculator look like part of your website.
Where to find the settings
Go to Fee Calculator → Calculator Settings. If your school doesn’t have a settings record yet, the page creates one and redirects you straight to the edit form.
Labels
The calculator uses several labels you can customise to match the words your school uses.
- Yearly fee label — what to call the annual total. Default Yearly fee. Some schools use Annual tuition, Year fee, etc.
- Term service charge label — label for the per-term service charge line.
- Yearly service charge label — label for the yearly service charge line.
Set these once and the calculator displays them consistently in the parent-facing UI and in emails.
Discount method
- Discount type — Built-in or Percentage. Determines which discount data the calculator uses. See Configuring sibling discounts for the full explanation.
Entry year range
- First year of entry — earliest entry year a parent can pick.
- Last year of entry — latest entry year a parent can pick.
- Beyond current year text — message shown when the parent picks a year outside the range. Used to direct them to contact the school for projections further out.
See Configuring entry years and fee escalation for the year mechanics.
Email settings
When a parent calculates fees, they can request a copy by email. The settings here control what they receive.
- Enable email fees — turn the email-summary feature on or off entirely. When off, the calculator just shows the result on screen.
- Encourage email collection — when on, the calculator hides the fee total until the parent provides their email. Use this if you want every calculation to capture a lead.
- From email — the email address the summary appears to come from.
- Email text — the body content of the email. Plain text or basic HTML.
- Summary PDF — optional PDF attached to every email. Used to send the school’s full fee schedule alongside the calculated total.
- Privacy policy URL — link shown next to the email-capture form so parents know how their data will be used.
- Privacy blurb — short text shown above the email field to explain why you’re collecting it.
Calculator appearance
- CSS stylesheet — paste a stylesheet here to override the default calculator styling. Useful when you want the calculator embedded on your website to match your brand. Common targets: font family, button colours, form field styling.
The stylesheet is loaded on the public calculator page and inside the iframe embed.
Feature flags
- Use custom fee ordering — when on, the Ordering field on each year-level fee controls the sibling sort order. When off, sorting is by yearly fee (highest first). See Setting up year-level fees.
Editing tips
- Test in incognito. After changing labels or CSS, open the public calculator URL in an incognito window to see what an unauthenticated parent sees.
- Validate your HTML. If you’re using HTML in Email text, keep it simple — schools’ email clients vary in how they render. Plain text usually works better.
- Keep the privacy text short. A line or two is plenty. Parents are skipping past it to fill in the form.
- Test the PDF attachment. Email yourself a calculation and check the PDF opens correctly. Replace it whenever the fee schedule changes.
What if there’s no settings record
The Calculator Settings page creates one for you the first time you visit. You can’t have more than one — the form auto-redirects to the existing record after the first save.
This means if you can’t see the form fields when you visit Calculator Settings, it’s already created and you’re looking at the edit screen.