A school on an island needed art and science materials for a term, with a fixed budget approved by a board that needed the whole figure before anybody could commit.
That is the hard part of a school order. A quotation for the goods is not the cost: the freight and the duty on eleven parcels of paper, paint, clay and glassware can be half again on top. We priced the entire thing as one total, with the freight and the duty estimated per line and the working shown, and the board approved a number that did not move afterwards.
Two items were dropped at our suggestion. A set of aerosol fixatives could not fly and would have held up the whole shipment by sea, and a box of glass beakers was cheaper from a supplier in Male once the freight was counted.
Everything else came as one consolidated box, cleared, and went out on the island's Wednesday boat. It arrived nine days before term. The final invoice was within two hundred rufiyaa of the estimate.
