To ensure your school gets the most out of your Monthly Free Allowance and any AI Subscriptions you have purchased, it is important to understand how to track your usage. This guide explains how to monitor your consumption, what happens when you hit certain thresholds, and why some interactions use more allowance than others.
The Administering and Managing Arbor AI Series
This guide is a part of a series. The guides in this series are:
Permissions
- You need the School: Arbor AI: Administer Arbor AI permission to view the Arbor AI Activity Log and you need School: General Admin: Administer to access the Arbor AI Dashboard.
If you do not have this permission, please speak to your school admin team about adding this permission using these instructions.
The Arbor AI Dashboard
You can monitor your school's remaining Monthly Free Allowance via the Arbor AI Dashboard under School > Arbor AI.
Here, you can see exactly how much of your Monthly Free Allowance (or paid AI Subscription top-up) has been consumed across your school, allowing you to make informed decisions about staff access and feature rollout.
More complex or multi-step questions typically use more AI credits behind the scenes, meaning you’d use more of your free allowance in one go. For example, asking Ask Arbor to simply find a student's contact details uses fewer background credits than asking it to generate a comprehensive, term-over-term behaviour report comparing multiple cohorts.
The Usage section
In the Usage section, you can see the following:
-
Free Monthly Allowance - This shows how much of your Monthly Free Allowance you've used up so far. If your school uses up your monthly allowance, your access to Arbor AI features will pause. You can either pay for an AI Subscription to keep using Arbor AI, or wait until your allowance resets at the start of the next calendar month.
- Purchased AI Credits - This shows how much of your (additional) AI subscription you've used up so far. We'll use up your Monthly Free Allowance first, then automatically switch to using your AI Subscription when the free allowance runs out. Your Monthly Free Allowance will reset on the first of each month, and it will always be used up before your AI Subscription.
Features and Ask Arbor
The Features and Ask Arbor sections of the dashboard show you in more granular detail exactly what AI features have been used in your school.
For each section, the top box show the total number of Ask Arbor interactions or Feature usages there have been.
Click on one of the sub-types of interaction or feature below that (E.g. Ask Arbor (Interventions) or Suggest student Summary) to see more details on the slide-over.
Auto Absence
If you use Auto Absence, you will also see how much time you have saved by using Auto Absence so far in the Features section.
Arbor AI Activity Log
If you want to dive deeper into your how much a single AI Feature use or Ask Arbor interaction has shaved off your allowance, you can head to your school's Activity Log (Arbor AI > AI Activity Log).
In the % of monthly allowance column, you will see the rough percentage of your total monthly allowance that was used each time Arbor AI was used in your school.
This allows you to get a really impression, on a per task basis, of how much you can expect to get out of your Monthly Free Allowance and Subscription
This can also help you identify any User's or Actions that are using most of your allowance so that you can put in controls for these if needed.
Usage Notifications
When you've nearly used up your Monthly Free Allowance, Arbor will email your Head Teacher.
- At 80% usage: Your Headteacher is notified via email and in-app notifications.
- At 90% usage: Your Headteacher and your Arbor Partnership Manager are notified via email and in-app notifications.
- At 100% usage: Your Headteacher and your Arbor Partnership Manager are notified via email and in-app notifications. Your Arbor AI features will be paused for the month. You can either pay to upgrade to AI Subscription to keep using them, or wait for your allowance to refresh next month.
FAQs
Why are we using up our Monthly Free Allowance?
Your school’s actual consumption of AI credits may vary based on the complexity, length, and structure of your queries and requests. More complex or multi-step questions typically use more AI tokens behind the scenes, meaning you’d use more of your free allowance in one go.
We recommend monitoring your usage via your Arbor AI dashboard to understand how your school is using your free allowance each month.
Can I manage user and school permissions to restrict who has access to Arbor AI?
Yes. You can control who accesses Arbor AI features by setting permissions in Arbor. This helps make sure staff use Arbor AI features in a way that suits your policies and needs. You can find more information about which business roles Ask Arbor will be enabled for on this help centre article.
By default, teachers and pastoral staff are excluded from accessing your standard Arbor AI features. They can be switched on manually, but you’ll see a warning that this may use up your allowance more quickly.
If your school purchases an AI Subscription, you'll get a much larger allowance, making it easier to extend access to teachers and pastoral staff so they can benefit from time-saving AI features as well.
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