How It Works...

Application Setup

The school lunch team setups up the staff, and the classes so that when parents enter their children into the system they can just pick the class the student is in. Each staff person has a user id created for them automatically so they can login and order online as well.

The next step is to enter all your suppliers and products into the database. This is so that when orders are placed the system can link the ordered items to suppliers and products to generate the supplier order forms for you. You can specify product name, a description, label text, cost and selling prices, and options for each item. You can even upload an image for a product which is very useful when selling fund-raiser items.

Menu Setup

To setup order forms a schedule must be defined, such as "Fall Lunch Orders", with a set of dates that have menus, perhaps every Friday from September to December. Then you create a menu for each of the defined menu dates by selecting products that you wish to sell. The menu items can be edited for price and to change the description or the title but the default values are taken from the data you have already entered into the supplier products. This saves considerable time as you don't have to enter the data over and over again for each menu item.

Parents Register and Order

The next step is that your school parents register to create their own account, they add their children into the system and then place orders for each of their children. We get the parents to enter their own data to ensure that we adhere to the privacy laws.

Once each family has finished ordering they can print out the orders to put on the fridge if they like, they can print out a remittance form if they want to pay with a check, or if you have setup a PayPal account they can pay on-line using their credit card.

On-line payments are automatically posted to the family account, checks must be posted manually by someone on the lunch team. It's easy to find out who owes money and to send them emails reminding them that they have a balance outstanding.

Lunch Processing

All that's left is for you to generate all the reports you need. Simply click a button to generate supplier order forms that you can email or fax to your suppliers, print off classroom delivery sheets so that the meals are delivered correctly, and then print off the revenue reports to track how your lunch program is doing.

The system provides dozens of reports to simplify your work, from a check register for the treasurer, a receivables report, PayPal transactions report, payment summary, user transactions, and a user activity report. You can even ask parents to enter their children's allergy information so that you can keep track of that information.

Lunch Delivery

Finally, vendors delivery the food to the school for someone to distribute to the students and staff who have ordered

Time Savings

This system will save your hot lunch team countless hours of time and improve the accuracy of the process so that you all have less stress. It is all about making it easier for everyone because school lunch programs are beneficial for everyone.