Cashless Catering - Who would everyone recommend?

[Nblakey96]

Evening All,

 

My Secondary school are looking to upgrade their current Civica till system.

 

I have arranged demos with Cunninghams and Biostore. Are there any other Cashless Catering providers that you would recommend?

 

Also, is anybody a current Cunninghams customer? I have only used them once before in a previous role (8+ years ago) and their support was awful.

 

Ideally, I need something with a good product and support which works with ParentPay

 

Thank you!

[6Foot2]

Based on personal experience alone, both EasyTrace (now ami Education Solutions) and Cunninghams promised much and delivered very little of what was promised.

 

However, I no longer work in education and situations may have changed. The last time I had any significant contact with Cunninghams was sometime before coronavirus changed our working lives. EasyTrace (ami) was much earlier than that!

[mdrabble]

Currently a NRS user and must admit I must fall lucky when dealing support - that said we only called them twice in the last 12 months.

 

First time was to change the timing on the kiosk machine and the other was to replace a broken LCD screen - which admittedly they mess up with by ordering the wrong part but worked out well for me as I only paid for the cheaper, wrong part!

 

Currently on version 7 and will only be looking to upgrade/move once Windows 10 become EOL.

 

Think support is an issue at most companies these days as they are lacking the training and/or number of staff to provide effective support.

[ozydave]

We was NRS and their support was great. but then civica took over and everything went down hill.

Forced an expensive upgrade on us.

 

Bottom line I cannot wait to get rid of them. Shocking support

Don't think we will be renewing the contract

[Jcx500]

We was NRS and their support was great. but then civica took over and everything went down hill.

Forced an expensive upgrade on us.

 

Bottom line I cannot wait to get rid of them. Shocking support

Don't think we will be renewing the contract

 

I agree with this , there support went awful after civica took control. We moved over to Cunninghams after a few incidents with support being awful.

[Wubbalubbadub]

I used Cunninghams for a long while.

 

The support and pricing are horrendous and really leave a bitter taste in your mouth!

 

I haven't ever used a different provider. I would hope there are better ones by now!

[Nblakey96]

I agree with this , there support went awful after civica took control. We moved over to Cunninghams after a few incidents with support being awful.

 

To be honest our experience with Civica isn`t too bad although we rarely contact support. How have you found Cunninghams?

[psydii]

AMI/EasyTrace do a good job for us with Infinity+

 

I think the trick is to not expect anything fancy.

 

 

We do not use any biometric options, because there lies a can of worms we don't need to open.

 

You can build a till for less than they charge - but then its your problem, so just buy it from them.

 

We've decommissioned all the cash loaders, so the quirks of mid-noughties IOT kit no longer haunts us.

 

It pulls data from SIMS and Parent Pay. It writes back to both, it provides a central database of all ID Cards which we can pull (or pay AMI to automate) for other systems. It tracks what kids are buying, and reports are available to Finance.

 

 

It basically never breaks - unless the admin/finance team have shirked doing their administrative house keeping tasks for a year or two. Pretty much the only problems we have had in the last five years have been self-inflicted. When we have needed support they have been pretty* responsive (*compared to how things were 7 years ago), but don't expect 15 minute response times, and at the busy points in the year (e.g. September When many school's poor house keeping has caught up with them), it can be a few hours before you can get help.

 

I would recommend never launching near the start/end of term. I would also recommend ensuring that the staff who administer the system have the full training, and that they schedule in time to complete the administrative tasks required to keep the system operating smoothly. Year end and New academic Years particularly. As with any system that pulls data from the MIS, careful co-ordination between the teams that run end-of-year processes is required.

[KoolTech]

Just to add my 2 cents worth, we used Cunninghams in all 4 of our Schools for years and they were horrendous! I would stay away as far as possible. Constant issues with little to no support.

 

We now use SIMS Pay now I believe but I now have nothing to do with it, thankfully!

[MartinT]

Not Synel. They work well enough but they have become too expensive too fast.

[supportman]

We moved away from cunninghams to biostore. Cunninghams just had really bad support lines and always busy.

[Nblakey96]

We moved away from cunninghams to biostore. Cunninghams just had really bad support lines and always busy.

 

Much appreciated, thank you. Judging from this post Cunninghams is a no-go!

[Chris_Cook]

We've been using LiveRegister for a few years now. No complaints, the system works very well. We've not had to use the support much, but they are always helpful.

 

We got our own touchscreen PCs from VeryPC due to bad experiences with another cashless catering supplier who shall rename nameless.

 

We use Mifare cards now instead of fingerprints. Its much faster and more hygienic.

[mthomas08]

+ another here with NRS > Civica.

 

Originally wasn't too bad but since Civica took them over.. emails don't get a response and a 30 minute wait time to talk to someone. We even had to chase regarding an engineer visit.

 

Unfortunately we upgraded their kit before things turned out like this..

 

If it's down to Covid.. hopefully this time next year things will be better?..

[maxrebo]

We moved to Biostore last summer, its been pretty bad since we moved, since they`ve been taken over by IRIS, their support has been terrible.

 

Their support seems to be run by around 3 people, its taken me two weeks for them to fix a hardware fault, which only seemed to speed up once I emailed their product manager and complained.

 

From our experience, I would STRONGLY advise you not to use IRIS

[borg]

Before Biostore, I had a full head of thick, dark hair.

I am now balding and grey and I blame at least 50% of this on Biostore.

 

Their support guys do their best but, as stated above, there seems to be about 2 or 3 of them and they simply cannot cover that volume of tickets.

Upgrades and hardware repairs are handled by their Professional Services team, who never answer the phone. If you can get hold of one of them they are very helpful but it took escalating to the county contracts team to get them to do anything.

[Jawloms]

To be honest they all seem to suck, you just need to pick one and hope they suck the least. Cunninghams suck the most though. We're with BioStore and their support has recently gone down hill when it comes to initial contact, but then they seem OK when you actually get help.

@borg - Joined 2014, Posts: 1?!

[IrritableTech]

We've been with Liveregister for years now and it all works pretty smoothly. They warned us that support may be slow this month after taking on a lot of new schools but to be honest their response times have remained good in my experience.

[maxrebo]

Before Biostore, I had a full head of thick, dark hair.

I am now balding and grey and I blame at least 50% of this on Biostore.

 

Their support guys do their best but, as stated above, there seems to be about 2 or 3 of them and they simply cannot cover that volume of tickets.

Upgrades and hardware repairs are handled by their Professional Services team, who never answer the phone. If you can get hold of one of them they are very helpful but it took escalating to the county contracts team to get them to do anything.

 

I`m glad its not just us then!

As mentioned, once they get round to helping you, tickets seem to get resolved quite quickly, its just the 6 days before that is very frustrating!

[pete]

We've had LiveRegister at one of our schools for a couple of years now (replaced Cunninghams) and would recommend them.

 

I'm looking to migrate another school to it, budgets allowing.

[DrBeaker]

Honestly not had any positive experiences with any providers who do this in all the years.

 

Cunninghams - begrudgingly came out to issues. The whole setup looked like something created in their garage in their spare time and bodge after bodge.

 

LiveRegister - surly support staff, very unhelpful. Recently someone got told "they were busy as they look after a lot of schools".

[6Foot2]

Honestly not had any positive experiences with any providers who do this in all the years..

A few years ago I was asked (told) to write a cashless catering system to replace the frequently crashing EasyTrace.

 

The "request" was postscripted with "After all, how difficult can it be? It's just a spreadsheet, isn't it?"

 

As I have only very elementary programming experience, I refused, but management couldn't see why and tried to force me to take the task.

 

Numpties!

 

#TrueStory

[supportman]

A few years ago I was asked (told) to write a cashless catering system to replace the frequently crashing EasyTrace.

 

The "request" was postscripted with "After all, how difficult can it be? It's just a spreadsheet, isn't it?"

 

As I have only very elementary programming experience, I refused, but management couldn't see why and tried to force me to take the task.

 

Numpties!

 

#TrueStory

 

You should have given them a spreadsheet with all students on the left and items to buy on the right.

 

New sheet for each day.

 

Finance could reconcile every evening for 6hrs.

 

easy lol

[kmonah]

We have been using Live Register for over 10 years now and they are very good any issues they respond in a good time, the kitchen staff and finance get on with it. We use it for much more than just cashless catering as well and all feeds in works very well.

[Chaniel]

I've said this before so I'm just going to copy paste that bit below, we've also had it where we've sent a PO for some work and been told they'll get it booked in... and then have to continually chase to get a response. Useless.

 

We use Civica (used to be Nationwide Retail Systems).

 

I cannot recommend them. The software works, but everything costs an arm and a leg. Need to install the software to manage the system on a new PC? That'll be £300 please, and no we won't give you the software to install yourself. Need a new till? That'll be a billion pounds and you need to pay for a engineer to come onsite to turn it on and confirm it works (aka change a few registry settings).

 

 

 

 

Edited September 21, 2021 by Chaniel