New Food Service Director Orientation
This tutorial is directed toward the Food Service Director that is installing the Systems Design Food Service System for the first time and those who may have assumed the position where the Systems Design Food Service System is already installed.
Assuming the duties of administering any new automated system is certainly a daunting task. We think it is helpful to learn the this system in two ways. First, most any system has a work flow that when known makes the system much less complicated to the operator. Second, although there may be hundreds of individual operations and tasks available within any system there are probably ten or twelve that are really necessary to operate the system. The other tasks are learned as the requirement is presented. This is the way we will approach this learning experience. The Food Service Director will remember that customer support is always available by calling our software support office at 800.887.1828. You may also submit questions and comments via our contact form.
Assuming the duties of administering any new automated system is certainly a daunting task. We think it is helpful to learn the this system in two ways. First, most any system has a work flow that when known makes the system much less complicated to the operator. Second, although there may be hundreds of individual operations and tasks available within any system there are probably ten or twelve that are really necessary to operate the system. The other tasks are learned as the requirement is presented. This is the way we will approach this learning experience. The Food Service Director will remember that customer support is always available by calling our software support office at 800.887.1828. You may also submit questions and comments via our contact form.
Work Flow
The work flow of the system is not that involved and may be stated in few steps. The basic operations of the system will be stated with the understanding that each step may have many associated tasks which will be either illustrated here or with instruction available. After the work flow is illustrated we will follow with links to associated tutorials if appropriate.
- First we must have an up to date student demographic file. The demographic file is normally imported from the school district PEIMS files directly to the food service server via ftp. Where this automated data transfer is not available the food service department must enter the new students enrolled, withdrawn students and student transfers manually. If you have an automatic transfer you will see a printout in your printer listing the student masterfile changes.
- The status of the students must be correct. Students free and reduced statuses are maintained by the use of the Lunch Application program or by manual maintenance. The Lunch Application program is of course the best and most efficient method.
- Learn the Point of Sale Program. The Food Service Director should be familiar with the operations of the tasks preformed by the cashiers at the point of sale. Most all of the data required to count and claim the meals served are captured at the point of sale. Accuracy at the cashier level is imperative and a basic requirement for managing the system. The important tasks at the point of sale are: correctly identification of the student, proper identification of the reimbursable meals, correctly recording the sale of reimbursable meals and ala carte items, correctly recording money transactions, printing the prescribed reports and reconciling cash at the end of the day and correcting mistakes if any are made.
- Completing the End of Day routine each day. This task which is accomplished in what we call the back office is important in that it completes the daily transactions and insures that all transactions for the day are in the proper files. Of particular note are two items that are very important. Within the End of Day process is the Accuclaim update which places all the recorded meals in files that will be accessed for end of month activities to include the filing of accurate claims. The End of Day process also produces several reports one of which is the Managers Daily Summary which contains important management data for the Food Service Director.
- Correcting meal and cash mistakes. Cashiers are responsible for correcting mistakes made at the point of sale. These corrections are made as a result of mistakes that may be made during the meal serving operations and will consist of either or incorrect serving of meals or incorrect recording of cash transactions. Since no operation is perfect we must assume that these mistakes will occur. Cashiers are instructed how to detect meal and cash mistakes by looking at the reports printed by them at the end of day and then make the necessary corrections to the individual student accounts. Experience and diligent cashiers make few mistakes but when they do then they must make corrections that day. There may be occasions that the cashiers do not make the required corrections so this task then falls to the back office. The system permits corrections to be made by the back office even on days other than the day the transactions were recorded. The End of Day reports are helpful to the back office in determining corrections that need to be made. Corrections at the point of sale and in the back office are important as accuracy is of course important when reporting and claiming.
- Maintaining Menu Items. The back office has control over maintaining the items available for sale along with associated pricing for students of different status, adults of various categories, visitors and others. This will include both reimbursable meal prices and ala cart item prices. The back office also maintains the buttons on the touch screen terminals that represent the items for sale at any individual POS terminal. All pricing, items available for sale and the buttons on the touch screen monitors are completely controlled in the back office.
- Report Printing. There are a large number of reports produced by the system available to the back office and to the Food Service Director. We will not list them here as the number is large and each director will select those most important to their management style. Report printing is listed in the work flow because within each step of the work flow there may be reports associated with that operation. There may be requirements to print out a student meal and cash history to provide to a parent or to assist in the correction of mistakes, there may be a requirement to print out a campus listing of all students or there may by need to print bar code class rosters and or student ID cards. There are reports for most all information requirements of a Food Service Director.
- End of Month Routine. After all activities are recorded and deemed to be accurate then we can do what we call the End of Month. Included in this task is running the program End of Month, printing the end of month reports, doing the Direct Certification update and several other operations that are covered in subsequent tutorials.
- Filing Reimbursement Claims. The culmination of the Food Service System and Point of Sale activities is of course the ability to timely and accurate filing of the Reimbursement Claim. The system provides for this process in any one of several ways to include filing a digital claim or filing the claim manually.
- Backing Up Your
Tutorials On Operations You Need To Know How To Do
The following is a list of tutorials on tasks that are essential to the operation of the Systems Design Food Service System. The list consists of a main title which is a link to the specific tutorial and a brief explanation following. This list follows closely to the sequence of the work flow section above. This list does not represent everything we need to know about the system but it does represent a good portion of the knowledge and understanding required for minimum and efficient operations.
- Learning How To Log On To the System This tutorial shows how to gain access to the system with your unique login.
- Adding A Student To The Master File. This lesson will show how to add a student to the student master file. We should note that students may be added even if there is a an automatic student demographic update installed at the district. Automatic demographic updates happen each night and represent the changes made during the previous day. The back office may add a student during the enrollment day without affecting the nightly update.
- Changing Information In The Student Master File System administrators have the ability to change information in a students file. There may be a number of reasons to do this even though the automatic demographic update syncs the district information with the food service data files. Changes to home room assignments are an example of changes can be made but all fields may changed except for the student ID number. In most all cases, changes made by the food service admin staff during the day will change back to the original information when the automatic update is done that night. Coordination with the PEIMS staff is important so changes you make may be entered into their system if appropriate.
- Student Statuses Must Be Correct To insure correct counting and claiming we must insure that the status of each student must be correct as related to free, reduced or paid. This may be done manually, as in the tutorial above, or by the Systems Design Lunch Application Program which manages lunch applications and interfaces directly with the student master file and or the Meal App Now on line application program.
- A Brief Overview of The What The Cashier Does This is a slide show that help you to see what the point of sale touch screen system does and the features of the point of sale devices. It is a very good idea for directors and others in the back office to spend a little time at the point of sale becoming familiar with this aspect of the system. You may also like to see the quick start cashier card and the POS cashier manual both of which contain valuable information.
- Do The End Of Day Routine The back office staff should do the End Of Day each and every business day. This is important so that all the meal and cash files are updated and the files are prepared for the next day.
- How To Correct Meal and Cash Mistakes Sometimes cashiers do not find and correct meal and cash mistakes made at their point of sale even though they should. Back office staff need to know how to make corrections for the current date and for previous days. This tutorial will show you how to Make Meal Input Corrections and how to Correct A Students Balance.
- Learn About Menus Systems Design supports simple and straight forward ways to manage menus, which is the term we use to refer to items for sale, from a central location which is the back office. The director may add, change names and prices, and delete items for sale. This link with point you to an overview of the menu program. In the menu program you will learn how to Add A Menu Item, Change A Price Of A Menu Item, or Move A Menu Item.
- How To Manage The Touch Screen Buttons A very useful feature of the System is the ability to add, change and move the information that appears on the individual cashiers touch screen monitors. The menu items offered for sale appear on the top of the cashiers touch screen monitor and are touched in order to record the sale of those items. Changes made to the files that contain this information, done in the back office, causes the values of the menu item buttons to change immediately at the campus. This tutorial will show how to manage these files.
- Printing Bar Code Documents Systems Design supplies printers with bar code fonts which permits the back office to produce various documents with bar codes. Bar codes are most useful in the quick identification of students at the point of sale. Many districts will supply students with ID cards with bar codes produced by the system. Bar coded ID cards are the most efficient way to identify students. Many districts also serve breakfast in the classroom and use bar code rosters to record meals served in each classroom. You will be able to produce these home room bar code rosters in the back office. Learn how to produce Bar Coded Student ID Cards and Home Room Bar Code Lists.
- Learn About Available Reports The system has a number of reports that may be printed that provide useful data to the administrator in the management of the Child Nutrition Program. These reports are explained in two tutorials that provide an overview of the content of each report on the menus. There are two report menus in the system, the Reports Menu and the Other Reports Menu. The reports you may print include those that provide current data and reports that provide archived information. You may go through the tutorials to learn about the management reports available.
- Review The System Protocols There are certain protocols associated with the system that when understood are very helpful to the system administrators. The way we log onto the system is very basic of course but there are other items such as how to unlock a terminal, manage printers and backing up data that are important and with which the back office should be familiar.
- Direct Certification Process Systems Design has included programs and special applications that assist administrators in the interface with the state that permit the downloading of digital files to PCs, the transfer of these files to the food service system, comprehensive manipulation of the direct certification data and the notification of households. This information will inform the administrators of this process. This information is provided via instruction sheets.
- End of Month Routine The system requires that the administrators preform certain tasks on the last day school day of the month. These actions are located in the end of the month routine and are illustrated in the tutorial on this subject. This routine provides for the creating of files for the new month and for printing various reports that are informative to the administrators. It is very important that this routine be run at the end of the month.
- Submission of Forms and Filing Claims The system provides for the filing of claims so that enable the district to be reimbursed for meals served. You may file a digital claim or you may file the claim manually. The digital claim program is designed to manipulate the claiming data derived from the activity of several of the systems program and then transmit this data in electronic format to the state. This tutorial will show how to file the reimbursement claim.
- Back Up Your Data We all know that protecting all the data that is accumulated on a day to day basis by the system is certainly worth protecting. One of the most important tasks that the food service administrator has is insuring that the captured and stored data is safe and therefore backed up. Systems Design offers several ways for this to happen. We provide DVD backup on a daily basis via a program in the computer that does the backup for you automatically each evening. All that is required is that the administrator insert the DVD marked for that day in the food service server. We also offer the service for an automatic off site backup whereby we transfer all your data to our secure servers each evening making your data safe from local problems. Ask about this offsite backup.