Cashless Catering

[noohad]

Hi everyone,

 

Hope you’re well.

 

We are currently with Civica on-prem for cashless catering. I would like to move away from them because their support is non-existent.

 

What are your thoughts on Iris, we do use their Parentmail for top up.

 

Or, we may consider Vericool or Live Register.

 

We are using biometrics (fingerprint). However, the scanners are slow and work intermittently. We are looking to move away from this and issue every student with an ID card with QR printed on them.

 

Any input on this would be very much appreciated.

 

Thank you.

 

Noohad

[dapaulio]

I have a mix across all the school I support and I Agree Civica support is woeful.

 

Vericool and Cunningham are in my other schools and hear very little about them having issues.

 

Dealt with Vericool over minor issues more and support has always been prompt.

[noohad]

Thank you so much.

 

How does Vericool work? Is it cloud based? Are you able to use your own devices or do they provide the POS?

[synaesthesia]

We just moved away from Iris as it was also diabolical. Support was non awful until we started kicking up a fuss, hardware was poor and the software even worse. Moved to Cunninghams, and even with having to re-enrol an entire school's biometrics, new year glitching etc it's been spot on. For the couple of teething issues we had their support was good.

[Aprice]

Just a pain to deal with Iris, when we last looked at it we were surprised at how little the school paid for it, which is the only reason they haven't looked to migrate.

[Rob_D]

We've also just moved away from Iris/Biostore.

Their support was a very mixed bag. Immediate issues (like the myriad of sync problems) were often dealt with in a reasonable timescale, although I've found engineers have a bad habit of opening a remote session and then not doing anything on it for a couple of hours. Getting support for larger issues (like why we keep getting sync problems), were just kicked down the road.

When we spoke to them (at this year's BETT), they were pushing their new, much improved, cloud based solution, but that didn't support biometrics yet.

 

We moved to cunninghams, which so far has been pretty smooth and seems to be working well.

 

Edit to say, we steered away from using ID cards for cashless catering (despite having student ID cards), because they were considered too stealable. It's much harder to borrow someone's finger without their consent.

Edited October 10, 2024 by Rob_D

[drutt]

Been with Cunninghams since shortly after the first cashless provider in our BSF contract folded, so I think 10 years now. I have no complaints, their support has always been prompt, system is easy to use and have very few problems. Recently integrated with our Bromcom setup we moved to earlier this year and things are going very well.

 

We use ID cards and Fingerprint, the main reason we added Fingerprint in the past year was because students consistently lose their card and slow down the dinner queue. Not worried about card theft really as the till operator can see a picture of the student pop-up when they swipe or use their fingerprint.

Edited October 10, 2024 by cnewstead

[noohad]

Interesting thank you guys.

 

Some of the people who I’ve spoken to didn’t recommend Cunninghams to me as they said the support was terrible and it was pricey as everything came at a cost.

 

I spoke to Iris about their Biostore, they’re trying to sell me their cloud version which is very cheap in comparison to others. Their sales seem very decent. Just worried about their support now after the feedback from you guys.

[DrBeaker]

Interesting thank you guys.

 

Some of the people who I’ve spoken to didn’t recommend Cunninghams to me as they said the support was terrible and it was pricey as everything came at a cost.

 

I spoke to Iris about their Biostore, they’re trying to sell me their cloud version which is very cheap in comparison to others. Their sales seem very decent. Just worried about their support now after the feedback from you guys.

Never really had a positive experience with Cunninghams and their reval units were a horrible mess you didn't want to touch.

 

LiveRegister once setup actually works quite well and their support is pretty good in my book.

However they'll try to pass the buck at times back to local IT support to sort out issues which are clearly issues with their machines, especially their reval units.

 

In reality we have to face that there's no money in this for any company to make a profit so a lot of systems and support are pretty basic or pretty rubbish implementations by the companies to save money.

[Ryharris]

I see.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Ok. I see.

[slugshead]

I took over a school already with Cunninghams in place.

 

I honestly cannot fault their customer service. Most things are dealt with then and there, when escalated it's very prompt.

 

We've actually gone deeper into their ecosystem and I've got no complaints at all.

 

Multiple tills, reval machine, ID store with MISlink and Paxton integrations. Recently have had the ParentPay integration setup. Everything works.

 

We've opted to move away from finger prints and PIN codes to just on the ID card.

 

I recently ran through a tabletop exercise with the team where we evaluated third parties systems (the solution, quality, support etc) and cunninghams came out at the top end of the list.

[dapaulio]

Thank you so much.

 

How does Vericool work? Is it cloud based? Are you able to use your own devices or do they provide the POS?

 

Can you use your own stuff. Vericool for obvious reasons probably don’t support this (or they didn’t last time I wanted to setup an outside event using my tablets)

 

It is cloud based. I used both their on prem and cloud solution and have no regrets. Over using your own hardware I think just ask them you may be able to come to some arrangement but I imagine this may impact the level of support they may offer.

[dapaulio]

I took over a school already with Cunninghams in place.

 

I honestly cannot fault their customer service. Most things are dealt with then and there, when escalated it's very prompt.

 

We've actually gone deeper into their ecosystem and I've got no complaints at all.

 

Multiple tills, reval machine, ID store with MISlink and Paxton integrations. Recently have had the ParentPay integration setup. Everything works.

 

We've opted to move away from finger prints and PIN codes to just on the ID card.

 

I recently ran through a tabletop exercise with the team where we evaluated third parties systems (the solution, quality, support etc) and cunninghams came out at the top end of the list.

 

To be fair I concur with everything said here. My other school I support has Cunningham’s face recognition and I have no problems with it. I think cashless vendors have really upped their game and my opinion is Civica haven’t invested in the development of their solution as much as others and because of that they are dying in their solution

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We have had a variety in recent years having moved from Civica.

Most of our schools are with Cunningham Impact and hosted by then offsite in Azure. This has made things much easier for the IT teams as we don’t have anything to manage! That being said, we do have some issues where Cunningham blame the “network” and we never seem to get it resolved. This seems to be their get out and pretty sure it’s an azure scaling problem rather than our brand new hardware running on brand new infrastructure and gigabit leased lines.

 

Vericool I had great hopes about. On the whole the service has been good and for most things support is prompt. However, one issue we do have is with the biometrics keep stopping working on a regular basis. Whilst support has been very helpful we don’t seem to have been able to stop it from actually occurring.

 

These issues have led me to decide that there are issues with all cashless systems so I’m just leaving it be!! At least it’s not on our servers so other than ring for support and ensure strong connectivity not much we can do. I know the catering manager wants to try Bluerunner but as this is a ParentPay/ESS product I have my reservations.

[gwendes]

Civica have been shockingly bad. We're looking at other cashless catering suppliers now and ParentPay's BlueRunner looks good. Has anyone had experience with it?

[sam.coombes]

Hello!

 

Similar situation here, although we are with Cunninghams and I'm looking to move away. Annual support has risen another 8% this year (from 6% last year). They say this supports ongoing improvements and innovation, yet i've not seen any changes for it. Reval machines are terrible. Balance check devices also lose connection constantly and the engineer just comes and replaces it for a different used device each time.

 

Reviews on Vericool would be appreciated. Our MIS is Arbor.

[jonnykewell1]

On 10/10/2024 at 21:17, slugshead said:

I took over a school already with Cunninghams in place.

 

I honestly cannot fault their customer service. Most things are dealt with then and there, when escalated it's very prompt.

 

We've actually gone deeper into their ecosystem and I've got no complaints at all.

 

Multiple tills, reval machine, ID store with MISlink and Paxton integrations. Recently have had the ParentPay integration setup. Everything works.

 

We've opted to move away from finger prints and PIN codes to just on the ID card.

 

I recently ran through a tabletop exercise with the team where we evaluated third parties systems (the solution, quality, support etc) and cunninghams came out at the top end of the list.

Could you expand on the Paxton integration and how that works please?

 

We're currently exploring new options as we're sick of Biostore and IRIS support is horrendous. 

[slugshead]

22 hours ago, jonnykewell1 said:

Could you expand on the Paxton integration and how that works please?

 

We're currently exploring new options as we're sick of Biostore and IRIS support is horrendous. 

 

CRB have a separate product called ID store, which sites in the middle

 

https://www.crbcunninghams.co.uk/idstore/

 

That pulls users from from AD using one of many methods. It monitors a folder for photographs and pulls them in too and attaches them to the user record.

 

Idstore pushes users into their cashless system, pushes them into paxton net2, including photos.

 

Permission groups from net2 sync back to idstore, I then pick an access level from the drop down, I can select multiple users to do this too.

 

Our student services team also use Id store to set free school meals etc.

 

It works well for us and I quite like it.