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School Meals

School Meal Settings

Before getting started with taking credits for school meals, we recommend setting up your meal types.

To setup and manage your school meal settings, go to the Payment tab in SchoolPing and choose Payment Settings from the drop-down menu.
In Payment Settings you will find a section with the heading School Meals.

To Add a meal type

It will be possible to add up to two different meal types.

Taking School Meal payments

To manage school meal payments, go to the Payment tab in SchoolPing and choose School Meals from the drop-down menu.

Note: School meal payments can only be taken using the SchoolPing wallet feature. Therefore, parents must activate their SchoolPing wallet before you can start taking payments for their child’s school meals.

To take Payments:

Where a pupil does not have a parent with an active wallet then N/A will be shown - no meals can be taken, and the pupil cannot be selected.

Transaction Information

When viewing a list of pupil names, you will see a column for Last transaction. This will be when the last school meal payment was taken - Hover you mouse over this date to view the following information:

Top tip:

Example
You may have a class where every child apart from 2 has had a main meal every day for a week. You can choose to view the Group and be shown all the pupils in the class. Select all pupils and then deselect the 2 pupils who did not have a meal every day. You can then choose to take main meal credits to pay for all the selected pupils meals and choose to take 5 credits.

Pupils linked to more than one parent

The first parent to setup their wallet is the primary wallet holder. It is from this wallet that any school meal payments for the child will be taken.
When another parent linked to the same child creates their wallet, they can only use their wallet to pay for payment items other than school meals.

To swap parents’ primary wallet:

School Meals Credit History

You can see a history of how many meal credits and/or manual meal payments have been taken from a parent’s wallet, which meal type, the amount, for which child and on which date.

The Credit history tab in the School Meals area will list all parents in alphabetical order of surname.

Filters

Use the drop-down filter to show just those with insufficient funds to pay for a meal per child and just those who have an unpaid meal.

Use the ‘cone’ icon beside the Filter drop-down to access the Advanced filter settings. Here you can:

Individual Credit History Detail

Expand the view for individual parent to see a history of meal credits taken from their account. The history will show with the most recent transaction first.

To see credit history for a parent, click on their name.

Handling Unpaid Meals

Where parents don’t have enough funds in their wallet to pay for the most expensive meal type then this will be indicated as ‘insufficient funds’.

Where credit has been taken for a meal, but the parent did not have enough funds this will be shown as ‘Unpaid meal’.

Where a meal credit has been taken but the parent does not have enough funds to pay for the meal, the parent will be sent a SchoolPing message to notify them. This will include the name of the child for whom the credit was unsuccessful and a link to top up their account.

Note: As soon as the funds are available in the parent’s wallet, the payments for these credits will be taken automatically.

Alerting parents

When one or more parents in the current display have insufficient funds or unpaid meals the SEND ALERT button will be activated. Clicking on this button will show the user a confirmation list of the selected parents with insufficient funds or unpaid meals and it will be possible for the user to untick any that they do not wish to send the alert to.