What makes a school meal payments system top of the class?

Between budgets being squeezed and trying to keep kids healthy, schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs) can find themselves under pressure to get top marks in school meal management.

Ensure your school meal payments system is as efficient as possible and discover solutions that make life easier for staff, students, parents and carers.

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Cloud-based cashless catering: simple for students, simple for schools

Online school meal payments help make lunchtime easier for staff and students alike – but is your payments system working as hard as it could be? A robust online cashless catering system that integrates with your school MIS can allow you to:

Collate and view useful data (e.g. which foods are more popular) to help plan meals and reduce waste
Automatically carry across critical student information, such as allergies or dietary requirements, so catering staff can prepare accordingly
Make changes to lunch menus across multiple academies or schools via one online system

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Quell lunchtime chaos at your school with QR codes

With an online school dinner management system, your students can pay for a nutritious lunch by scanning a QR code.

Here are some benefits of using QR codes:

They can be printed for a matter of pennies and quickly provided when situations arise (for example new starters or visitors)
Unlike an alternative solution like biometric scanning, there’s no need to invest in a new on-site scanning system to get started
Schools can use existing tech like iPads to scan the codes and set up a simple school dinner payment system

Allow parents to pay school dinners online and then provide pupils with QR codes by moving to a cashless catering system.

Unlocking the value of your cashless catering solution

Cashless catering and online school meal payments are a fantastic innovation – but as technology advances, so do the potential benefits for schools and trusts.

Using QR codes to keep queues to a minimum
As we mentioned earlier, there are several benefits to using QR codes in your school meal management system, including:
- Keeping things simple for catering staff
- Being easy to set up and implement
- Being cost-effective and simple to maintain (if a student loses their QR code, it costs little to nothing to replace it).
However, one of the biggest advantages is minimising queuing at lunchtime, especially for younger pupils. Primary schools that use a QR code system allow parents and carers to book lunches for their children in advance, which means queues move faster at lunchtime.
Clean plates, less waste

By ensuring your online school dinner payment solution and your MIS are working together, schools and trusts can reduce food waste and encourage clean plates at lunchtime.

Without adequate data, schools have to rely on guesswork to plan their menus, which can result in excess food being prepared and wasted. By using an MIS with sophisticated reporting functionality, schools and trusts can collate and analyse data from their online meal management systems.

For example, if a trust is able to spot a sharp rise in students requesting vegan meals, they can ensure their schools are planning menus and ordering food accordingly. This can help reduce food waste and ensure students are getting the food they want and need.
Minimising overspend and making budgets go further

In addition to minimising food wastage, a well-connected school management system can also help schools and trusts save money. By taking data gathered from a trust-wide meal management system, trust leadership can get a clearer picture of how to minimise excess spending and adhere to budgets.

Less popular foods or meals can be phased out and replaced with more popular choices, cutting down on food wastage and saving money. Data such as what the most popular food items are can also be extremely useful when negotiating contracts, such as food orders.
Keeping sensitive data safe

Unlike on-site server systems, cloud-based school dinner payment solutions are designed to be secure and dependable.

Some educational institutions use standalone servers to manage school dinner ordering. However, if the server crashes, catering staff may not have access to planned menus and important student information like allergies, which can lead to disaster in the kitchen. Plus, when your catering system goes down, students aren’t able to pay using your cashless solution, meaning chaos in the canteen, too.

Cloud-based solutions also benefit from having enhanced security measures, so your data is always protected. This is particularly crucial if your catering system is connected to your school or trust’s MIS.

Online school meal payment systems are kept on the cloud; all you need to access it is an internet connection. This means you’re no longer relying on a single piece of software that lives on your school’s local server.

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Featured Guide

Get the most out of cashless catering: a free guide for schools and multi-academy trusts

Download your free guide to making sure your school meal management system is top of the class.

In this guide, you’ll learn about:

On-site servers vs cloud-based solution
Integrating your MIS with a cloud system
Using software to reduce food waste
How to connect your school or trust systems to improve meal management
Cashless catering software recommendations

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Serve up a better school meals solution with IRIS Education

Are you looking for a school lunch payment system that can add value to your school or trust?

Explore the IRIS Education range of solutions, including our complete school management information system (MIS) IRIS Ed:gen and its partner, the cloud-based cashless catering system IRIS BioStore Portal.

Learn more

Consideration school dinners testimonials | School Meal Payments

IRIS Education

“IRIS Education offered the products that felt like the best fit for our trust. The integration of the solutions means we are working smarter with our data, our processes are smoother, and we’re making efficiencies. What’s more, we have one team to support us, and one supplier to build a great relationship with. We’ve been working with IRIS Education for a year now and we’ve got a fantastic relationship with the team. They aren’t afraid to go back and ask certain questions or make enhancements on our behalf, it feels like a partnership and we’re all on the same team.”