Cashless catering recommendations

[FragglePete]

Cunninghams here, moved away from Vericool a few years back. The Cunninghams setup does seem a tad clunky, but it works and the speed of the biometric readers compared to Vericool is pretty impressive.

 

Support has bit a bit hit and miss; when you do get them to engage and you get the right person then it's great, otherwise you get the impression 'Why are you bothering us?' type attitude.

 

The farce at the moment is the amount they charge to update your Note Readers and Coin Mechs to recognise the new currency. £495 each time for them to turn up and swap out the mech/reader - time on site less than 10 minutes. The coin mech we did ourselves, sent it off during a half term period to get reprogrammed; cost less than £100 I think. Just need to look in getting the reader updated now to recognise the new £10 notes.

 

Pete

[NB9457]

Cunninghams here, moved away from Vericool a few years back. The Cunninghams setup does seem a tad clunky, but it works and the speed of the biometric readers compared to Vericool is pretty impressive.

 

Support has bit a bit hit and miss; when you do get them to engage and you get the right person then it's great, otherwise you get the impression 'Why are you bothering us?' type attitude.

 

The farce at the moment is the amount they charge to update your Note Readers and Coin Mechs to recognise the new currency. £495 each time for them to turn up and swap out the mech/reader - time on site less than 10 minutes. The coin mech we did ourselves, sent it off during a half term period to get reprogrammed; cost less than £100 I think. Just need to look in getting the reader updated now to recognise the new £10 notes.

 

Pete

 

We took the readers out of ours, checked who the manufacturer was and we got the new updated full mech straight from the manufacturer for much less than NRS wanted. Can't believe the markup they put on, it's not even like they're covering overheard/support plus a bit on top, it's just greed to me.

[howartp]

Moved from Cunninghams to NRS at Easter.

 

Overall a positive move.

 

We're such a large site and have integration with SmartID (Paxton, Papercut, Inventry) as well as the link from ParentPay so was always going to be some teething issues - but generally they've been dealt with really well. We are a Premium customer (can't recall the word, something else beginning with P) so I suspect I often get through first line quicker than most, and I do have permission to speak directly to $God at NRS if I request it - I'm careful not to abuse this but he can fix things in seconds or advise his colleagues what to do so quickly then we can get on with our other jobs.

 

(No, I won't reveal $God's name!)

[gh5000]

+1 for live register. Same experiences as ppl above

[kennysarmy]

I'm wondering as I'm looking for some recommendations for the new school I'm involved in if this thread could be resurrected with the latest companies that are being used in secondary schools?

[Sylv3r]

We are currently using CRB and our tills are coming upto 8 year old so will need to be replaced. We are therefore looking at other companies and their solutions at this time to test the market.

 

We've not had any specific issues with CRB and the kit has been extremely reliable for us and we've never had an issue with support. It also integrates well with SchoolCOMMS - our parent engagement app and online payment system. The support contract costs are relatively high however.

 

I have a quote from Live register and to replace our POS, software and revalv machine including installation, we are looking at a similar cost of our maintenance contract for the first 4 years on what appears to be similar to a lease agreement and then the maintenance cost halves from year 5.

 

I've had a demo of Biostore today and the product looks on PAR to CRB, but seems to be more flexible in the things it can do with additional reports available. It integrates with SchoolCOMMS also as well as upto 250 other partners for various things such as door entry, print release, online payment systems etc. I don't have the cost through yet, so I am not sure how comparable they are.

[fredbayker]

+1 for Cunninghams.

Also as @Sylv3r has said, biostore have now have their own offering and may have encroached on Cunninghams turf and as a result Cunninghams now also offer their own suite of ‘tools’ in response. At least this was what I was told, somebody correct me if I’m wrong.

[maxrebo]

Hi,

We have a demo of Biostore next week, I assume they integrate with Parent Pay?

[Cazab]

Definitely don't use ParentPay. They mis-sold functionality of the product to a primary school I support and their response and support have been atrocious. SBM is fuming.

E.g. no documentation on what permissions their software needs for SIMS.

Told primary they can do lunch ordering in 5-day blocks (week by week) - they can't, it can only do daily.

Told it can sync all users and details to ParentPay - it can't it will only do pupils and first contact details/limited, so staff have to be put in manually.

[ITBadger]

@maxrebo Yes, it integrates with ParentPay in much the same way as Cunninghams did.