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Hello edugeeks We have come across an issue that I suspect has been there since we moved to Arbor a 3 years ago. You will want to check your systems too and please feedback to me. A new student this year has a massive long list of food allergies so has come to speak to the kitchen staff. When we checked his record on the Sharp tills it shows nothing at all about any warnings - This is a major issue as could have serious consequences something they think is ok to eat could contain nuts for example it could kill them. The way how Arbor has allergens it lists everything in brackets so for example: No Pluses (Beans, Lentils, Peas, Chickpeas), Dairy Free (No Milk/Yoghurt/Cheese/Butter) This is good as if we have a admin staff member helping out in the kitchen on tills due to kitchen staff illness they will at least know what pulses are if they don't have a clue for example. However Sharp software is just expecting No pulses, No Nuts, Dairy Free etc so very short fields for display warning when a student is at the till. Basically if the data is too long Sharp just ignore it no warnings or anything. Now we have investigated we have about 5-10 students that don't show on the tills at all. This is a low number but not the point. We can manually on the till data edit the students record to have limited text displayed but my point is then each time we have a new student start we would then have to manually check: do they have allergens that need to display on the tills and are they too long. What happens if a student then becomes vegan so that then takes their record over the character limit we don't know when people make a change to dietary requirements as IT. Sharp have said they have never had this at any other school before and can create a custom setup for us but will charge for it (don't know costs). We did not know we had issues before now and students in other year groups are also affected if this new student had not spoken to the kitchen staff we would be in the dark as would not know as you hope it just works. In my mind even if the till displayed an error to say data too long at least you know there is an issue that needs to be investigated. It does not help parents can use the notes field in dietary to say epipen carrier etc so that also tries to sync adding to the length issue. Maybe this is more of an Arbor issue and other tills may have same sort of problems with sync. Do people just manually check every record to make sure it displays (we only have about 160 students on the list out of 1100) but I want to know it works ideally automatically Thanks for you time If anyone has Arbor and Sharp tills please have a look for me and PM or post on here. Most work without issues we ran a report on all students with Dietary requirements and looked for the long ones.

Infineer have been purchased by Emos, please see this post as they are now trading again. Can anyone on here corroborate a rumour we heard that our cashless catering supplier, Infineer, has gone into receivership? Their website still looks the same, but the phone is not being answered. Another supplier is phoning around trying to hoover up business at the moment. We don't currently need them for any part of normal operations, but obviously there are going to be problems if we have an ePoS unit fail which sadly does happen once every few months.

Our school is current being fitted out with a new Cunninghams cashless solution leaving us with 3 vericool revals (one new) and 8 tills. If any school out there uses Vericool and could use the equipment or parts (for a small donation to school funds) please let us know.

Hi All, Just to let you know that we have tested the SIMs Autumn release with the Gladstone system and all seems to working fine. Just remember that the SIMs client needs updateing on the cashless catering server. Thanks

Hello, We are in the process of replacing our cashless catering system and are getting feedback from users of the systems we are considering. I have set up a survey here with the points we are interested in: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=-DIAZ76itUOzPLBg-d_NxCFYwdCe2EBEoToGR5KCG4lUM1FRU082SVY5Ujg5VVZOTTBLSUtUMk82Qg%3D%3D The companies we are particularly interested in are Live Register and BioStore FasTrack, however we have also listed Cunninghams, Vericool and Nationwide. If we get enough response I will try and summarise and post back for the rest of the community. Thanks David

Dear Easytrace customer, If you are an Easytrace cashless catering customer and SIMs is your primary MIS system you will already be aware that the SIMS 2012 Autumn Release 7.148 is now available for upgrade and your school will most likely be planning the installation of this very shortly. Here are some simple steps for you to follow in order to avoid the update affecting the integration with Easytrace Back Office software. Firstly, ensure the SIMS client on the Easytrace server is updated. Make sure you log in and check it runs ok. Check that the connect.ini file is NOT redirected to the S:\ drive. Make sure it contains the fully qualified path to the SIMS SQL Database. Once updated make sure all the AMI services are restarted. Stop them from top to bottom and then restart from bottom to top – making sure the WCF service is running before the others. The integration should now continue to work. If you have any difficulties with the above or if you have followed the steps but there are subsequent issues with the SIMs integration, do not hesitate to contact us by calling our support line on 08450 714 667 or email [email protected] Thank you, Easytrace Support Team

I am currently designing and implementing a new Active Directory domain and am looking for a cashless solution to provide an account for our students to pay for printing, catering and library fines. Ideally I would like students to be able to credit a single account for all purposes. Any suggestions or recommendations would be appreciated.

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!

Hi, Has anyone got a workaround regarding the FSM transitional protection for FSM pupils. We currently use SIMS, NRS for cashless catering and ParentPay. From April 2019 in Wales, when a pupil is no longer eligible for FSM (end date entered onto SIMS) they are still entitled to FSM (FSM Transitional protection - tick box in SIMS in FSM area) until they finish school. However when SIMS, NRS and ParentPay sync the FSM protection is not honoured in FSM. We have tried to add an FSM eligibility manually in NRS and ParentPay but these are ignored by the NRS cashless catering. Anyone got idea or suggestions?

Hi there. Is anyone using Nationwide and Agora together? I have a reference site but wanted opinions on how well the two integrate. We've had Agora for a few years but aren't cashless catering yet. Also, what happens in September when parents haven't yet got logins to Agora but their children want lunch from the canteen in the first few weeks? We would like to go as 'cashless' as possible and would prefer to use biometric so I can't imagine how it'll work. We will only have one top-up machine in our bid to go completely cashless too (to make it less appealing to top-up that way). Hope someone can help! Thank you.

Hi Initially we were with NRS and their support was great.After Civica took over NRS there support is terrible and sometimes have to wait for 30-40 minutes to speak to the support agent and Civica have not bothered to improved their service.I know there are some cashless vendors and please could you share your experience with support etc.....Are you experiencing the same with other vendors? Thanks

We are currently with Cevica (was NRS) for our Cashless Catering linked to ParentPay. We have been informed that our cashless catering system comes to end of life in September. So I have 3 options: Option 1 – Update to the latest version (version 9) of the software. This will bring us up-to-date with a system that can be covered by a service contract. Basically the backend of the system will be operated through a web browser. We have asked for a quote on this one. Extra if we wanted it all to go cloud based. However, we would be using our existing ageing hardware – 7+ year old now! Option 2 – Purchase a complete new system through Civica and replace our existing hardware / software – full refresh. Awaiting quote. Option 3 – Look for an alternative system. We have been looking at alternative systems CRB Cunninghams or Cypad (BlueRunner). Any advice? Are any schools using BlueRunner? What are your thoughts on CRB Cunninghams? We are currently having issued with Cevica's support (up to an hour waiting time on the phone / 3 moths to reolve support tickets). Any advice would be appreciated.

Hello all! We are looking into moving away from our Mifare cards which we use with our current print management system and our NRS cashless catering system over to Paxton. We currently use Paxton for our door control systems and it is also compatible with our new print management system too. Does anybody here use Paxton cards with their NRS catering system over the standard Mifare offering or know if this is possible? We have called NRS but they didn't seem to understand what it was we were asking them so we haven't got an answer from them. Any information is much appreciated! Thanks JD