SIMS, Parent Pay and FSM eligibility

[ZGSims]

This is my first post - hope it's in the right place. My school has recently moved from Facility to SIMS and we now run a regular automatic update to Parent Pay. When we first switched over, we had an issue with students who are eligible for FSM but who do not claim FSM - their parent pay accounts were credited with money for meals taken even though they are not using their entitlement. We had to take these students eligibility off SIMS and we now have this recorded in a notes field.

 

Obviously we need to record FSM eligibility on SIMS for our Census return so we can claim for pupil premium funding. What do other schools do to manage this?

 

Thanks in advance.

[CyberDrac]

I was thinking, tick the FSM eligibility but with an expiry date in the past, but I suspect it uses the date to determine whether it is valid?

 

edit: we also use ParentPay but the FSM money is added daily at the till software instead of ParentPay and the balance is cleared at the end of each day.

Edited May 17, 2016 by CyberDrac

[bobsmith]

This doesn't seem like a SIMS problem at all, have you taken it up with ParentPay themselves or your till provider?

 

1000's of schools are using SIMS and recording FSM eligibility within it, there's also loads of schools using parentpay (like us) without this issue.

[mattstevenson2005]

You can't remove FSM data from the FSM section in SIMS this is collected in the Census to determine pupil premium funding and other top up funding.

 

Matt

[PhilNeal]

Info from our Statuary Returns Product Manager - I hope this helps!

 

FSM Eligibility used to be collected by the DfE as at Census date, but that is no longer the case. The DfE now collects FSM Eligibility as dated records and any manipulating of those records to suit other areas is very likely to lead to false information being sent to the DfE for FSM Eligibility. As these FSM Eligibility records are the main source for the DfEs allocation of Deprivation Pupil Premium, a school that falsifies this information could be accused of misappropriating public funds, which can attract draconian penalties.

 

FSM Eligibility indicates the time periods over which the central authority has agreed with the parent that their circumstances (indicated by certain benefits) can be used to justify a meal that is free at the point of delivery. It has no direct links with the actual taking of a free school meal. Being Eligible for FSM does not force a child to take a free school meal. Moreover, many parents decide not to even apply for FSM Eligibility when their child is taught in years R to 2, as all children in England taught in those years can get a free meal anyway.

[ZGSims]

I've spoken to SIMS, Parent Pay and our till provider to no avail. Apparently there is no way to switch off the money being credited to their account if they have dates in the FSM eligibility fields on SIMS (which are the basis for the Census and funding). These parents are aware they are eligible but choose not to claim their meal and do not want to have their Parent Pay accounts credited. Any ideas?

[CyberDrac]

As others have said, it shouldn't be credited to the ParentPay account, it isn't the school's role to put money in an account which could potentially be withdrawn by the parents.

It is down to the till software, who provides your EPOS systems, we're with Cunninghams and use their 'Impact' till software and that seems to handle it perfectly well.

If you want I can ask out catering manager how they work with it, but from my perspective I just ensure that the information is present and correct in SIMS and that the link to Impact (via GroupCall and BioStore) is working.

[ZGSims]

We are with NRS and they are adamant that the issue is with Parent Pay as they only act on the data provided by them. Parent Pay are adamant that they can only act on the data that comes from SIMS which gives eligibility dates. Another local school thinks they may have resolved this issue - waiting to speak to them now! Will post here if I get it resolved in case anyone else has a similar problem.

[Steve21]

SIMs gives ParentPay the dates. But it's Truste (NRS) that issues the money onto the account etc (Which then syncs back to ParentPay). But if NRS is doing it right it shouldn't be added onto the normal balance as it's a different one within their software :s

 

Steve

[Huxy]

Hope this has been sorted for you. If not I can post a solution for you.

[vikpaw]

Hope this has been sorted for you. If not I can post a solution for you.

 

Go for it, it might help others, or shed some light on the issue.

[ZGSims]

Sadly not resolved - please post if you can!

[localzuk]

My information may be a little out of date but hopefully it will help.

 

We used to use ParentPay here, and ParentPay very much only acted on the details sent to them - they are not the "master" data holder for the till system. I wrote the integration software for our school's cashless software for ParentPay and FSM was handled by the cashless software, and ParentPay simply told what was happening.

 

So, it is NRS that is deducting things. It should not, at any stage, be done in a "automatic deduction" way, as this would lead to fraud (ie. claiming for meals never taken). It should only be deducted at the point of sale to reflect actual meals being taken.

[Huxy]

In SIMS you need to add FSM eligibility (See this link for details how to do this). When the correct eligibility dates are added you then need to run the NRS SIMS extractor. This is mainly used to export the FSM, biometric consent field and photos from SIMS into the NRS system.

 

One this has been done and the ParentPay system updates with the NRS after the pre-defined time (or you can manually update this on the NRS server) the finance should take care of itself. It will automatically credit pupil accounts back if theyr have used their own money but eligible for FSM during that period.

 

Hope this makes sense and is of help.

[Cache]

We've been having various issues with this recently. Ours seems to work in a slightly different way.

 

Accounts and eligibility are all sent to ParentPay and then the NRS script pulls down the account details and sets FSM dates and deducts accordingly.

 

You'll also need to check that your FSM "price" as it were is set ocrrectly in parentpay otherwise you'll find that the balance is being adjusted incorrectly by ParentPay to bring things into sync. You can backdate the cost of an FSM in ParentPay and it will retrospectively credit the balances accordingly with the correct ammount.

 

We also had an issue recently where refunds wern't being uploaded to ParentPay so the NRS software was deducting the correct amount, crediting it back, deducting the right amount but only the deductions were being sent up to ParentPay, the NRS scripts then saw the balance as being out of sync and decuted the difference again to cancel out the refund - that was a nightmare to go through and correct everybody's balances who had a refund because the NRS script wouldn't work retrospectively on the refunds.