School Supply Budget
Name, then cost, then optionally how many and how often: Set texts, 62, 3 or Printing, 6, weekly. Anything without a frequency is charged once this term. Use | instead of commas if your prices are written with a decimal comma.
Cost of the term
$539.19
$160.81 of what you put by is still unspent.
- Set texts × 3$186.00
- Lab coat and goggles$38.00
- Scientific calculator$24.00
- Printing and photocopying$72.00 ($6.00 every week)
- Studio materials$124.19 ($45.00 every month)
- Union membership$10.00 ($30.00 every year)
- Field trip contribution$85.00
There is no price list behind this tool and there is not going to be one. What a set text or a lab kit costs depends on the country, the institution, the year and the edition, and a figure guessed on your behalf would look researched while being wrong. Every number above is one you supplied.
Recurring costs are put on a single footing so the total means something: a yearly charge is divided by the terms in your year, and a weekly or monthly one is multiplied up by the length of the term — 12 weeks here, which is 2.8 months. The picker beside the heading only decides which symbol these figures are printed with — the prices you type are already in your own money, and nothing is converted between one currency and another.
An itemiser, deliberately not a price guide
Search for what a term of supplies costs and you will find averages. They are averages across whole countries, usually a year or two old, usually drawn from a survey with its own definition of what counts. Applied to your reading list, your studio, your institution and this year’s edition of anything, they are not merely imprecise — they are describing somebody else entirely.
So this tool ships with no figures of its own. You supply the prices, from the bookshop, the departmental handout, the fee schedule and the group chat where somebody has already bought the equipment. What the tool contributes is the part that is genuinely error-prone: multiplying quantities out, converting recurring charges to a common period, and keeping a running total against the money that actually exists.
Putting a yearly fee and a weekly one on the same footing
A budget goes wrong when charges arriving at different rhythms are added together as though they were the same kind of thing. A one-off 85 for a field trip, a 30 membership billed once a year and 6 a week of printing are three different animals, and adding 85, 30 and 6 produces a number that describes nothing.
Everything is therefore converted to one term before it is totalled. An annual charge is divided by the terms in your year, so that 30 membership contributes 10 to a three-term year. A weekly charge is multiplied by the weeks the term runs, so 6 a week over twelve weeks is 72 — more than the field trip, and a good deal less visible than it.
The lines people leave off
One-off purchases are the ones that get budgeted, because they are the ones with a shock attached. The costs that quietly do the damage are small, repeated and dull: printing and binding, lab consumables, studio materials, replacement stationery, the software subscription that only has a student rate for the first year, travel to a placement, a locker, an exam entry fee, the deposit on equipment that comes back at the end.
Adding them at their true frequency is what turns a list into a budget. The per-week figure the tool reports is usually the more useful of the two numbers, because a shortfall spread across a term is a decision about habits, while the same shortfall as a lump sum is only an occasion for alarm.
Reading the total against what you have
The total on its own is a fact about prices. Set against the money already put by, it becomes a fact about the term: either an amount still unspent, or a gap that has to be closed by earning it, borrowing it, buying second-hand, or deciding that something on the list is optional after all.
Nothing here converts currency or knows what any symbol means. Keep every price in one currency and the arithmetic is sound; mix two and the total is a number with no meaning, calculated perfectly.
Set texts, library copies and things that last years
Why will it not tell me what a set text costs?
Because any figure it offered would be a guess dressed as research. Prices differ by country, institution, edition and year, and a wrong number that looks authoritative is worse than an empty field, which at least sends you to check the actual reading list.
How should I enter something that lasts several years?
Either put the whole price in the term you actually pay it, which is what your bank account will experience, or divide it yourself across the terms it covers if you are trying to see a fair per-term cost. Both are defensible; mixing them within one list is not.
What about books I can borrow from the library?
Leave them off, or enter them at zero with a note in the name, and add only what you genuinely have to own. It is worth doing the list twice, once assuming you buy everything and once assuming you borrow what you can, because the difference is often the whole shortfall.
Can I use it for a school year rather than a university term?
Yes. Set the weeks to the length of whatever period you are budgeting and the terms per year to how many of those the year contains, and the recurring conversions follow. The tool has no opinion about what an institution is.