佣金表没人负责就会漂移。

A rate card starts as a clean document. An institution sends its terms, somebody saves the attachment, and for a season the office invoices from it. Then a regional manager offers a higher rate on one faculty for one intake. Then a bonus is agreed over a call. Then the terms are revised and the new version arrives without anybody noticing that a clause about withdrawals changed.

Two years later the office is invoicing from an understanding held by one person, supported by an email thread nobody else can find. That is not a filing problem. It is a revenue problem that will present itself as a dispute, usually at the worst possible time of year.

What a rate card has to say.

A rate is the least of it. What determines whether an invoice can be justified is the surrounding conditions, and those are the parts that live in the email rather than in the attachment.

• What the percentage applies to: first year tuition, the whole programme, gross or net of scholarships and discounts.
• Which programmes are included, and which are explicitly excluded.
• When it becomes payable: on enrolment, on a census or verification date, or on the institution's own payment cycle.
• What happens on withdrawal, deferral, transfer between programmes and transfer between campuses.
• Whether the student has to be attributed to the agency in a particular way, and by when.
• Which currency, and who carries the conversion.

An agency that cannot answer the fourth and fifth of those for a given institution is going to lose an argument about a clawback at some point, and will lose it with the paperwork rather than on the merits.

Version it, do not edit it.

The one habit that fixes most of this is refusing to change a rate card in place. A new version gets a new record with the date it takes effect and the date it was agreed. The old version stays, because it is what governs the students who enrolled while it was current.

This matters more than it sounds. A cohort that enrolled in February is invoiced under February's terms even if the terms changed in June, and a system that only knows the current rate will quietly invoice the whole cohort at the wrong number.

The email is part of the record.

Most changes arrive informally, and the informality is not the problem. The problem is that the informal message is the only evidence and it is stored in one person's mailbox.

1. 01When a rate or a condition changes by email, attach the email to the institution record rather than summarising it.
2. 02Record who at the institution sent it and in what role, because a verbal agreement with someone who has since left is worth very little.
3. 03Record the effective date separately from the date of the message. They are rarely the same.
4. 04Note whether it supersedes an existing term or sits alongside it, which is the question every dispute turns on.

Reconcile against it, not from it.

A rate card earns its keep when the invoice is checked against it by somebody who did not raise the invoice. That check finds two things regularly: enrolments invoiced at a stale rate, and enrolments never invoiced at all because nobody knew they had happened.

The second is more common than agencies expect. It is the direct cost of a rate card that lives in somebody's head, because a person who is busy cannot reconcile a list they are also the only source of.

Who owns it.

One named person per institution, whose job includes asking once a year whether the terms still say what the file says. Not a committee and not the person who happens to be on the call. A name, in the institution record, next to the date they last checked.

It is an hour per institution annually, and it replaces the conversation that otherwise happens in the middle of a disputed cohort, with an invoice already sent and nobody able to produce the version of the terms it was raised under. Against that, it is the cheapest hour in the business.