Cashless Catering - Two Schools - One Shared Canteen

[Smitty]

We're looking for a new Cashless Catering solution as the current one is now out of support, but we have an unusual configuration with two completely independent schools each with their own systems, including MIS and Parent Payment Systems, but one canteen.

 

So far we've only found one vendor that believes that their software can handle this cleanly, we've tried quite a few other vendors and the only way they seem to be able to make it work is have two separate systems which would mean the catering data spread across two systems and needing separate tills for each school.

 

Would be interested to know if anyone else operates a similar model and would be willing to share how they manage it, or for any suggestions of how to overcome the problems, short of merging the schools or building another canteen!

[MisterTechMan]

I could be thinking outside the box here and there probably is a far simpler solution, but could you put two hard drives for dual OS in the tills and boot into each school's system?

 

Or could you have two VM's running on the till? That may be easier?

Edited February 7, 2025 by MisterTechMan
Added additional information

[p858snake]

Simplest solution would be not to link it to either school, Have a dedicated system online payment system.

 

Who owns/operates the canteen at the moment, is it one of the schools? parents group?

[DavidYoung]

LiveRegister can do this. At my last trust, we had 2 secondary schools each with their own canteen but one catering company. We had 1 LiveRegister server which imported from both school MISs (SIMS then Arbor) and each school payment system (ParentPay then Arbor).

Students and staff from both schools could purchase from each canteen.

While the tills were separated into groups for each school, if they had just one physical canteen that would also have worked.

[HereIGoAgain2601]

We have this setup with CRB. It works just as well as the rest of our CRB schools…

[Smitty]

Thanks everyone,

 

@ MisterTechMan Having separate systems is one possible scenario, it would mean an overhead of managing the catering side (menu's, pricing, reporting etc.) in two systems as well as finding a way to have two tills systems (even if we dual boot or virtualize.)

 

 

@p858snake We currently have a working solution in place with both schools sharing a single system and the data being merged in from each school, but the solution is EOL and the vendors new cloud solution can't handle this scenario. I guess a completely separate system is an option we can consider, but there would be an overhead of transferring and maintaining the staff and students details in the system and parents having multiple payment systems, one for the canteen and one for the school might be a challenge.

 

@DavidYoung LiveRegister isn't one that we've looked at, will add them to the list.

 

@ HereIGoAgain2601 CRB are the one vendor that have claimed they can do it, reassuring to hear that somebody is successfully running the config.

[mthomas08]

We compared CRB and Civica, and deciced to stick with Civica... big regret.

 

If the choice comes down to CRB/Civica +1 CRB although pricier.