Write the fees down before you take any.

Read a year of complaints at almost any agency and a pattern emerges. Very few are about the quality of advice. Most are about money the family says they did not know they would have to pay, or money they expected back and did not get. Both are disclosure failures, and both are preventable with one document given at one moment.

What belongs in a fee schedule.

Not just your own charges. The family is trying to answer one question — what will this cost us in total — and a schedule that only lists your service fee answers a question nobody asked.

• Your service fee, what it covers, and what it explicitly does not cover.
• When each portion is payable and what triggers it: signing, application submitted, offer received, visa granted.
• Third-party costs the family will pay directly: application fees, deposits, health cover, visa charges, biometrics, medicals, translation, courier, test fees.
• Which of these you collect on their behalf and which they pay themselves, because that determines who they ask for a refund.
• The currency of each amount and who bears exchange and transfer costs.
• Any commission you receive from an institution in connection with their enrolment. Say it plainly. A family who learns it from someone else assumes it was hidden.

What belongs in a refund policy.

Refund policies fail when they are written as principles. Write yours as scenarios, because scenarios are what families actually face.

1. 01The student withdraws before any application is submitted.
2. 02The student withdraws after applications are submitted but before an offer.
3. 03The student is not admitted anywhere.
4. 04The student is admitted, pays a deposit, and the visa is refused.
5. 05The student is admitted and changes their mind.
6. 06The student defers to a later intake.
7. 07The agency cannot deliver — a partner relationship ends, a programme closes.

For each: what is refundable, what is not, what deadline applies, and how long a refund takes. Third-party amounts follow the third party's own terms, and the schedule should say so, because the institution's deposit terms are frequently stricter than yours and the family will assume otherwise.

When to disclose.

Before the first payment, and in a form the family can keep. In practice that means at the end of the first substantive counselling session — early enough that the family can still walk away without cost, which is precisely why it feels uncomfortable and precisely why it must be then.

Re-disclose whenever the schedule changes or the plan changes. A student who moves from one destination to another has a different cost picture and needs a new schedule, not a verbal amendment.

Language and comprehension.

Give it in the language the family are being counselled in. A schedule in English handed to parents who are being advised in Vietnamese or Portuguese is a formality, not a disclosure, and everyone in the room knows it. If the student is under eighteen, the person paying should receive it directly rather than through the student.

Sub-agents use your schedule.

If a partner recruits for you, the family should receive the same schedule, showing any fee the sub-agent charges as well as yours. A family paying two fees they did not know about is the fastest route to a complaint you cannot defend, because from the family's side there was only ever one agency.

Receipts and who holds the money.

Issue a receipt for every payment you take, naming what it is for and whether it is your fee or money you are passing to a third party. Money held on a student's behalf should be identifiable as theirs rather than mixed into working capital — that is an accounting arrangement to set up with your accountant, and it is the difference between a refund being an inconvenience and being impossible in the month it is requested.

The uncomfortable test.

Pick a student who enrolled last year. Can you produce, in under a minute, the exact fee schedule they were shown, the date they received it, and their acknowledgement of it? If not, the policy exists but the practice does not — and the practice is the only part anyone can rely on.