We had a very unusual email today from a student at the University of Bristol who had completed our quote request form. When we followed up we received the following email from her:

“Hi Anna, is University Transcriptions a free service for university students?  If this is not the case, I would like to cancel it.  It was not clearly specified before requesting the quote.”

What is a Quotation?

This particular email got us scratching our heads as to whether students understand what a quote is when it comes to giving someone a price for work to be done.  Did he think it was a quotation from one of our pieces of work, a citation from a satisfied client or a price for anyone else but not if you are a student?

We can remember being students, although it is a long time since any of our management team have been in full time academic study, so we can understand entirely why students ask about services being free. 

Students and Low Income

Students have very little income and never really have the money to spend on completing transcriptions, unless they have managed to obtain external funding.  This is rarely the case and very often it is more likely that students will not be able to afford to use our services unless they have a source of income or funding to help pay for it. 

Whilst we would love to offer our services for free to students, we still have rather a lot of overheads to pay if we were to undertake any work on their behalf.

Costly Overheads

Firstly, we have a bank of transcribers.  Every time work is transcribed we have to pay our transcribers to complete it.  This is the same whether it is one of the company directors (e.g. I am dictating this article and it will need to be transcribed), whether it is a multi-national corporation with billions of dollars of income to spend on services like transcription, or whether it is a student with a four minute recording of a seminar that needs transcribing for the following day.  We still have to pay this cost. To provide a free service to students when we have to pay for the service to be completed ourselves would be impossible.

I have just mentioned the cost of transcribers, but not included the costs of running the business, paying VAT, paying corporation tax, paying for the advertising costs, the costs of writing tenders to obtain work, the technology costs of maintaining websites, file upload services, IT security and every other overhead a business has to incur.  All of this has to come out of the price per minute that we charge.

Free Transcription – DIY

If you are a student reading this and wondering how to get free transcription services then the best bet is to do the work yourself.  This is completely free, other than your time. If you do require an accurate and fast transcriptions service please feel free to contact us.

University Preferred Suppliers

We work with just about every university in the UK as well as universities and academic institutions around the world.  Our company is also a preferred supplier to a large number of universities as well. We are always happy to speak to students about work they need doing and to see whether we can assist. 

If you would like a chat with our Managing Director to discuss your project please email Anna@TPTranscription.co.uk or contact us.