Each message names a different stage, and only one is about credits at all. Match the wording before assuming the organization has run out.
"Institutional Access cannot be purchased using membership entries"
This is the message students meet most often, and it is not about your credit balance. An institutional category cannot be paid for with the entries included in a personal UNI membership. The registration screen puts it as a notice, "Institutional Access must be purchased directly and cannot use membership entries", and moves the student back to the payment option.
Nothing is wrong with your organization: the student is choosing the wrong way to pay.
The credit path returns six messages
- "User is not a member of any organization." The account is not attached to any organization. An invitation sent but never accepted is the usual cause.
- "This competition has not been assigned to your organization." Nobody has assigned that competition. A curator, admin or owner assigns it from the organization's Institutional section.
- "No valid assignment found. You must be an accepted member of the assigned classroom." The competition was assigned to a classroom rather than to the whole organization, and this student has no accepted place in it. Check the classroom's member list rather than the invitation you sent.
- "No active institutional credits available for this organization." One sentence covers four situations: the credits are used up, the plan has expired, the plan is not an Institutional one, or no credit pool was ever created for the organization. You cannot tell them apart from the message, so read the balance and write to UNI if it looks wrong.
- "This institutional pass covers entries across N competitions and that limit has been reached." The pass has unused credits, but the organization has already entered its cap of different competitions (3 on a Department-level pool, 6 on School, unlimited on University). Entering a competition already used by the pass is unaffected — the cap counts distinct competitions, not entries. The fix is to enter one of the competitions already in use, or buy another pass.
- "Competition not found." The competition being asked for does not exist.
Two things to know before a credit is spent
Withdrawing refunds the credit, if the deadline has not passed. Withdraw while the competition's submission deadline is still open and the credit goes back to the pool, ready to spend on another entry. Withdraw after submissions have closed and the credit stays spent — the institution used its slot for that competition.
A purchase can attach credits to the wrong organization, or to none. The pool goes automatically to an organization the buyer owns or administers, picked without asking. A buyer who runs more than one can end up with the credits on the wrong one, and a buyer with no organization yet, or who sits on it as an ordinary member, gets no pool at all and no warning. If your balance is missing after paying, raise it with UNI: it cannot be moved from the interface.