JoeMathewson

Just to let you know our support desk are open on the bank holiday to help schools get ready for September. Just give them a bell or email as usual and they'll get it all sorted for you.

Thank you for the kind comments and I appreciate your frustration. Just to answer a couple of your questions we separate the charges on the quote simply because one is a one-off and the other is recurring. Both will always appear on any quote that we give out. Our planning and training meetings should never delay a deployment because we fully respect the school's internal time constraints and plans and often schools install immediately and then schedule in a planning meeting and then training at times that suit them. So you would absolutely be able to install immediately on signing up and schedule in a planning meeting to suit you. Thank you for sharing further details about your financial constraints; I'll make sure we're in touch to see what we can do to help. We are purely interested in successful, long term school deployments, even at the expense (perhaps unusually!) of just closing the next sale, and I'm sorry if this has come across as inflexible or defensive - that is never our intention.

Sorry for jumping in on this thread but as there has been a bit of confusion about our setup charge on this thread I thought it would be worth clearing up for both parties here and anyone else who may be interested. It's also never our intention to set off on a bad footing. We make a setup charge because of our experience working with hundreds of schools and our belief that any successful software implementation is 'not just about the software'. Also very important to any rollout is the human side - putting together a project plan, making sure staff training is considered, and also customising the platform with a school to make sure it meets the individual school's needs and branding. We involve specialist teams for all of these different aspects, including multiple onsite visits to the school as well as remote support, and these all incur a cost which we need to make sure we recoup to build a sustainable business and be here to build long term relationships with all of our clients for years to come. We don't think it would be right or honest for this to be an optional 'addon' of our offering because of how important getting these elements right are to a successful rollout. Part of the confusion above may be because of the range of things we pack into the setup charge. Our setup charge currently includes help with setting up your onsite installation / setup of cloud hosted installation; integration with your school's MIS; onsite planning and project management meeting; separate onsite training with staff; branding of your site with your logo and colour scheme. As I say, these will involve multiple specialists from different teams. Our aim is to always be very straightforward on pricing and this is a charge applied to all schools, and should always be included on any quote we give out. If you've been given a quote by a member of Firefly staff that doesn't include this, please do let me know and I'll look into it immediately.