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The School Hot Lunch add-on is by far the largest of the add-on suites to date. This suite automates the lunch ordering, payment, and reporting systems in one easy online interface. To fully show this suite we will break it down into three sections. The first will be the administrator controls found in Spruance, including the reports. The second will be the front user interface that your students and parents will use. The third is a step by step process of how parents register on the system, and the administrator’s process behind the scenes to correlate the parent with the digital student record.
The main menu is simply found on the right hand side of the SMS main screen as shown below. This document will step through each of the functions.
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Programs
Hot lunch programs are a set span of time which lunches are assigned. In most cases, these are simply the months of the year. Programs cannot overlap, and the meals that you will create later will have to be placed within a program start and end dates.
Why are the programs so important? It is really the cutoff date. When that date hits, your students and parents are no longer able to create new orders. You will need to set that early enough to make all your internal orders to vendors and prepare for the upcoming month.
As with all the other parts of the SMS system, each program and other part of the Hot Lunch suite is based on the school year. This means that past orders, meals, programs, etc..., will not need to be removed and may remain as a data backup.
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Groups
Hot Lunch groups are important for your internal staff and faculty. Of course there will always be a student group, but what this screen really allows is different pricing for others in your organization like faculty, staff, temp staff, etc…
For each hot lunch group, you will give it a title, summary, and the default costs for a meal. You are able to change each and every meal pricing as shown later, but this allows a default price to make meal entry quicker. The system will allow you to create as many hot lunch groups as needed.
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Vendors
Hot Lunch vendors can be assigned to meals in order to allow greater reporting and tracking.
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Meals
The Hot Lunch meals are of course the heart of this entire suite. You can create unlimited meals and place more than one on a single day. When you first open the meal manager tool in Spruance, you will be shown a dynamic calendar showing the present month, the program assigned for the days, and any meals already created.
As you can see from our Daslos Academy demo, we are showing the January 2010 program. There are already meals created for the 4th through the 6th. In order to edit any meal, simply click on the meal name. To create a meal for any particular day, just click the new meal button found at the bottom of each day’s box on the calendar.
When either opening an existing meal or creating a new one, the meal screen will appear the same. The interface is very intuitive and user friendly.
From within the meal editor screen you are able to give a meal a title, a detailed description with photos, set the pricing for each group, and set the vendors. The pricing for each group will originally show the default meal cost as we set earlier when creating hot lunch groups.
The “More” cost is added to the meal cost to give a total. Allowing a student or staff member to order more of a meal is an option set here and is set for each individual meal. This screen will show all the groups that you have created for that school year. Assigning a vendor for this meal is a simple drop down list and is used for reporting. However assigning a vendor to a meal is not required.
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Order Manager
The order manager tool inside Spruance is essentially the same interface as used by parents and students to create orders. This tool is used if changes are required past cut off dates, or a parent fills out a paper order form. This is where office administrators will be able to simply enter in an order for a student.
The only real difference between this interface and the one the parents use, is that here you are able to select the program and any student. Changes made through this system are displayed in the account as made by a system administrator.
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Order Cancellation Manager
Have an unscheduled field trip, a snow day, or some other reason to cancel a meal or more? The order cancellation manager allows system administrators to cancel and give refunds to any number of ordered meals for a particular day.
This tool will only display the current date and the date prior. After selecting a date, select the students with meals ordered from the middle. The student records are organized by grade and class. If the entire school body is off, just click the “select all” button above to select all the students at once.
There are two types cancellations for meals, refunded and not. To cancel the meal and automatically credit the students account for the price of the meal, select to refund. Finally, by giving a very brief one or two word reason for the cancellation, just click the submit button, and it is all taken care of.
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Accounts Deposit
There are typically two ways for users to pay the balance on their accounts; check and online credit card. Credit card transactions are handled automatically, and there is no need for any interaction on the part of administrators. However, check and cash payments for accounts are handled here with a very simple interface.
By selecting any student or staff record from the left you are automatically shown their current balance. Just enter in the amount to be credited to their account balance, and click the button. It is really that simple.
Users will be able to see the credit immediately on the front end account interface using their login.
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Reports
The reports are very important to keep your lunch program organized and flowing well. There are six different reports originally released with the hot lunch program. We say originally released, because we are constantly working to add more as needed. We rely on your input and continual guidance to allow us to continually improve the entire system.
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Program Summary Report
The program summary report is a quick report designed to display the total numbers for a particular program. You will notice that each day that has meals is displayed along with the total number of orders as well as the total number of more requests. If a student requested a meal with more helpings, it would display both as an order and as a more request.
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Lunch by Grade Report
The lunch by grade report simply displays the names and meals for a full grade for a particular day. Simply enter the date you wish to display, and click on the grade or grades you wish to report on.
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Lunch by Class Report
The lunch by class report works the same way as the lunch by grade report except gives the administrator the ability to select only a single or multiple classes to report on.
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Total Payments Report
The total payment report simply gives an overview of each student and staff members account balance and activity for the selected program.
The report from our Daslos Academy demo site shows two records. Each contact and staff member will be shown in this screen. The program debt means the total amount purchased during the program selected, in this case January.
The total debt refers to the total spent during the selected school year. The total paid also indicates the total paid either online or in person the selected school year.
The balance works like a typical credit card. Purchases are made against the student’s account and are added to the balance. When payments are made, the balance is deducted. It is really that easy.
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Class Month Report
The class monthly report displays the ordered meals for one or more classes for an entire program period. The report generates two different grids, one the list of the students and their orders, and another which is the key to know which meal is which for days with multiple meals.
As you can see from our Daslos Academy demo, we have selected Mr. Weisfeld’s first grade class for the January 2010 program. The top grid shows each student from the selected class and the dates for the month that have meals assigned to them. Each meal is assigned a numeric value based on the number of meals in a day. The “m” following a meal, like on the 5th of January as shown, means that this student has ordered more portions for this day.
The bottom graph is the key and shows the meal number for a day to allow administrators to know which meal was ordered. This split approach makes printing and keeping the many students in a class organized.
Both the student list and the key are easily exported to PDF format for quick printing and displaying in the classroom.
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Monthly Financial Report
The monthly financial report is a very simple report to show how much was ordered in all the months of a school year. This report is based on the date the payments were made, and does not correlate with programs. It simply shows how much income the program generated for that month.
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The following is what parents, students, and staff will see when the log into your online public system. Some of the tools will be similar to what you have already seen in the Spruance administrator interface. The examples here are from our Daslos Academy website, and show James Murawski being logged in.
To the left is shown all the meal programs that are active. If any of them are still active and yet have hit their cutoff date for orders, the “edit orders” button will be removed allowing users the ability to view their orders, but not make changes to them.
By clicking on the “edit orders” button on any program, the user will be taken to the meal order screen. There they will again see all the accounts assigned to this user’s login. Our demo parent James Murawski, has one student assigned to him, but is also listed because he is selected as a faculty member as well.
Just click on which account you wish to make a meal order for and the meals will immediately be displayed on the right. If you have already made an order, then your previous selection will be shown, allowing you to make changes if needed. By clicking on the “update totals” button, the user will be shown the total cost of their change prior to submitting the order to the system.
If a user doesn’t wish to use the online order form, they may make a simple printout of all the meals for that particular meal program. By clicking the “print order form” button found just under the account names, a popup screen will appear that will list all the possible meals and descriptions.
The second option for any meal program is to view orders. The view orders page is simply a dynamic calendar which will display one or more selected user’s meals for a particular month.
By checking one or more of the accounts, the meals will display in the calendar offering a quick view of what is to come.
The second main function set in the public facing hot lunch interface is the account information. This screen will display all the user account associated with this logged in user and their total balance.
To view a more detailed description of what the costs actually came from, a user can just click on either of the names to pull a new screen which will show a breakdown of all account activity.
In this case, we have clicked on Jimmy Murawski’s account record. As you can see there were three changes made to his account. In the demo, what we did was to create an order for several meals, then later cancel them, and then order them again. By hovering over any of the notes in the grid, you will be able to see a more detailed view of the transaction.
The public facing user interface also allows users to pay online using any major credit card. By clicking on the “make online payment” button the user will be taken to a secure page where they will be able to enter in their credit card information.
Within minutes of the transaction, the account balance will be automatically updated to show the new payment.
To gain a clearer understanding of the parent registration process, this document will step through a new parent signup and the steps that an administrator must take in order to get them properly setup. In this demonstration, our parent James Murawski is a new parent registering on the Daslos Academy site. James clicks on the parent registration form, and fills it out.
When James clicks the submit button he is immediately sent a confirmation E-Mail welcoming him to the program with instructions on it. He is also sent to a thank you page with the same instructions as shown here.
At this point James has done all he can do. It is up to the school administrator to get him the rest of the way. At the same moment that James was sent that confirmation E-Mail, a second informative one was sent to the school office automatically. This message simply alerts the school office that a new parent registration has been made.
The school administrator will enter Spruance, and go to the CRM system to do a search for James. When they open the CRM search page, they will see some new options specially created for the hot lunch program.
Administrators are now able to do a search based on the actual enrolled students or other groups from a particular school year. However, the administrator is looking for James. Notice that under the groups for the hot lunch program, there is a line with “New Parent Request (1)”. The one indicating that there is one new parent request pending.
By making this search, the administrator will see James’ record and will open it up. The edit contact screen now has a tab on the top for “hot lunch” as shown here.
The administrator can see that James is not yet enrolled in the hot lunch system, and can see his request in the green. The administrator will now click the radio button to add James as a “Parent / Other”. When this is selected, new options automatically appear on the screen instantly.
The administrator is able to now find James’ son from the students list and check him. James is not a faculty or any other group, rather just a parent, so no group should be selected from the drop down list. All that needs to be done for James is assigning his son to his account.
This second action taken by the system administrator further ensures that parents are able to see the right kid’s account.
And that is it. When James logs into to the Daslos Academy website he will see his son’s account online and able to make orders for him. And just like that, you have both an updated parent record in the system as well as a double check that each parent has the right student account assigned.
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Call 330-635-6861 for a FREE demonstration.
Downloads:
School Lunch Program Overview
Key Features:
- Implement Anytime
- Easy Parent Ordering
- Online E-Commerce Payments
- Meal Details and Advanced Options
- Advanced Classroom Reporting
- Multiple System Reports
- Quick Setup
- Detailed Account Details
- Not a Boxed Solution = Highly Upgradable
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