Civica Cashless Catering

[JJMC]

Hello folks,

 

Noting the recent news that Blackstone is to acquire Civica;

 

https://www.civica.com/en-gb/news-library/blackstone-to-acquire-civica-heralding-new-chapter-in-companys-journey-to-become-a-global-govtech-champion/

 

is anyone else having real difficulty in contacting their Cashless Catering Support? I can't say they've been the quickest to respond in the past, but at least they responded. I've had nothing back from a couple of emails, cannot get logged into the Self Service Portal and after a few attempts at ringing, the latter staying on hold for two hours (I was "number 1 in the queue") I couldn't get through at all.

 

I've spoken to a acquaintance at another school who I know has Civica Cashless Catering and he has had the exact same issue of not being able to get through to Helpdesk from last week.

 

I'm getting a bad feeling.....

 

Regards.

 

James.

[dapaulio]

Since they installed new tills at one of our schools we had nothing but problems. 3 months on and had no resolution to intermittent till connectivity drop. They can’t even blame our network as over the summer they had new switches throughout with 2x 10gb uplinks with their tills completely vlan segregated. It be unfair for me to say they haven’t been in contact as they have but not really helping to get a solution is not forth coming. Not sure what communication there has between the school and civica but as a third party I’m concerned and if they don’t start taking their thumb out of their proverbial I will advising that they look towards exiting their contract.

[CrootUK]

We also recently had an upgrade, I have nothing positive to say.

 

we also have tickets with no response.

 

If I were to go into detail my french would get me banned.

Edited December 19, 2023 by CrootUK

[Olliedawg]

If you are looking to change from Civica, I can recommend Vericool Cashless Catering. They offer both on-prem and cloud solutions. We have had them at our school for many years now, never really had a complaint.

 

Support is good - tickets are always responded to within a couple of hours at most.

[RLR]

+1 for vericool. We've had them for years now after moving away from Cunninghams. We moved from their on-prem system to their cloud system this summer and not really had any issues. It's not fully cloud as the menu still needs to be edited via a local application but I assume this will eventually be in the cloud.

[Iain.Faulkner]

We had similar poor experience with Civica support with the one school that was using them. When I managed to get through, the engineer that I spoke to said he was the only engineer doing first line support and was manic.....

 

The advice we were given was to upgrade the tills and the version of their software we were using, but when we got the price through we chose to move elsewhere instead as it was better value for money.

[JJMC]

I looked at this a while ago when we were with CRB Cunninghams linked to SIMS .net but moved to Civica when we changed MIS to Bromcom. Does Vericool fully integrate with Bromcom would you know ie. parents can use MCAS to top up lunch money with the balance appearing on the catering system, rather than it just being a user sync?

[Olliedawg]

I looked at this a while ago when we were with CRB Cunninghams linked to SIMS .net but moved to Civica when we changed MIS to Bromcom. Does Vericool fully integrate with Bromcom would you know ie. parents can use MCAS to top up lunch money with the balance appearing on the catering system, rather than it just being a user sync?

 

We use Bromcom as our MIS, however we use ParentPay topping up lunch money.. It would be worth an email to ask regarding MCAS - I would be surprised if they didn't support it.

[dapaulio]

If you are looking to change from Civica, I can recommend Vericool Cashless Catering. They offer both on-prem and cloud solutions. We have had them at our school for many years now, never really had a complaint.

 

Support is good - tickets are always responded to within a couple of hours at most.

 

I second Vericool. Out of all the schools we manage Vericool comes out top for cashless is my opinion. They are not the cheapest but after support is polar apart from others

[ITGuyNW]

Our finance department have just "upgraded" their main server and till software and now they crash every day, randomly go down etc. It's becoming a nightmare tbh.