New to Cashless Catering - Recommendations for a school using Arbor?

[toffee_paul]

Hi all,

 

We're looking into setting up cashless catering for the first time. Can anyone recommend a supplier what will work well with our Arbor MIS?

 

Regards.

[Tefters]

Live Register.

 

Fantastic team [emoji106]

[toffee_paul]

Thanks Tefters. I've had a look at their website, and wow, absolutely nothing that gives any idea of how it looks/works etc!

 

We have a fixed/primary menu here and SLT would like it to be done via students' fingerprints as it would save messing with cards/tills etc. Does Live Register support this? Do your catering staff use a till or a tablet and how effective is it?

[Rob_D]

Cunninghams is working well for us, we're Bromcom, but they use Wonde so I don't see why it should be any different on another MIS. The setup went really smooth and the canteen staff find the system easy to use and nice and quick.

 

How are you planning to ID the students, rf card, fingerprint, facial recognition, etc? Cunninghams (along with most systems) will support all the obvious ones.

 

[Edit:] Cunninghams will do fingerprints, part of the install was having a tech in for a day to help get the bulk of the kids registered.

We use mostly fixed till points, they do a wireless tablet, but you have to sign a waver saying you understand the risks of doing transactions over wireless.

Edited October 15, 2024 by Rob_D

[FragglePete]

Cunninghams here also - was using Schoolgateway for payments up until Summer '24 where we migrated payments over to Arbor Pay. In typical Cunninghams fashion, was a chargeable service to do the migration.

 

Works well, no issues and has been a lot less administration than Schoolgateway in dealing with parents having issues.

 

Cunninghams does seem to plod along once it's all setup and running. Our catering company want to move the Cunninghams server to hosted in the near future which will make their life easier as they can update menus, etc remotely easier and one less thing to worry about on site for me.

 

Pete

[sefton]

We're an Arbor trust using Arbor pay and we have Cunninghams and Civica in our schools, both work fine, much better than we had Parentpay in the middle, although we will rationalise to one provider next year.