Food Booking System

Really wasn't sure where to put this so if anyone has a better idea please move it.

Being a boarding school we dont only have to worry about how many are in for lunch but also breakfast, tea, weekends. The problem occurs with sports fixtures, evening events etc.

Up until now this has some how manage to cope on word of mouth and scraps of paper but as the school has grown this has started to mean some people just aren't getting enough food.

Are there any other boarding schools out there that have this problem? How have you got around it? We are looking for a digital based system to get rid of paper which the catering manager says we just need a simplified hotel booking system but i know there will be very little (read no) budget for this.

Anyone?

Scraps of paper combined with an Excel sheet in the kitchens here from what I've seen..

Something like an excel or basic access DB was my inital thought too but thought i'd see if anyone has the same problems first. :D

There are some hotel booking systems on Sourceforge which may be adaptable.

If you run a joomla site there are many plugins that will help you with this, I looked into it when I was looking for a similar booking system for my own business and all i could see was hotel/restaurant bookings.
Joomla Extensions

Sounds to me like you could create a quick access database, seperate the front from the back, stick the back on a server and allocate the front to anyone who might need to 'add/view' bookings.

You could write something up in php/mysql. Front end takes orders, backend just lists the orders.

Might take this up as a project in a week or two....