This series of articles provides a step-by-step guide for schools to set up meal management in Arbor, including permissions, meal creation, pricing, scheduling, and attendee management. It also covers optional features like regular meal choices and how to handle free meals for eligible students.
If your school wants to use Meals in Arbor, follow the instructions in these guides to set this up on your site.
It is also possible for meals to be booked in advance using Meal Menus. See how to set this up after completing steps 1 through 5 in this series here: Rotating Meal Menus.
This guide is the first guide in a series of eight. The other guides in this series are:
- Setting Up Meals - Introduction
- Setting Up Meals - Step 1 - Adding a Meal
- Setting Up Meals - Step 2 - Adding Provisions
- Setting Up Meals - Step 3 - Adding Prices
- Setting Up Meals - Step 4 - Scheduling Meal Sittings
- Setting Up Meals - Step 5 - Managing Attendees
- Setting Up Meals - Optional - Regular Meal Choices
- Setting Up Meals - Frequently Asked Questions and Further Reading
Permissions
- Meals: Administer All Students - Set up meals for students
- Finance: Administer - Set prices for the meals
If you don't have the relevant permission, ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.
How long will the setup take?
- Add a meal - 1 minute
- Add provisions - 5 minutes
- Add prices for meals - 15 minutes
- Schedule meal sittings - 5 minutes
- Add meal attendees - 5 minutes
- (Optional) Add meal choices - varies depending on the number of students
Before setting up meals
First, decide whether you wish to charge all students for meals.
If you don't want to charge students for meals, please skip the Setting Up Meals - Step 3 - Adding Prices guide in this series.
If you do want to charge students, please check the following:
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You have set up card payments in Arbor. If you want to enable payments to be made via card for Meals, you'll need to make sure you have completed the Card Payments setup.
- You're on the right package. Meals are included in all our Perform packages and our newest Comms package. All other Arbor packages won’t have this feature by default. Contact customersales@arbor-education.com for information on your current package and upgrades.
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Make sure there is a Customer Account type for meals in School > Payments > Setup > Customer Account Types, and that it's set to Show on Parent Portal on this page if you want guardians to be able to top up the account.
- Make sure you have switched on your Meals Customer Account type in Students > Parents & Guardians > Parent Portal Settings, and ensure your Parent Portal Payments Settings fit your needs so you can allow guardians to view Meals account balances and make top-ups on the Parent Portal and App.
- Set starting balances to bring over any starting money from your previous meal management system: Creating Initial Account Balances
Once you are confident that you have everything in place to start setting up your meals, proceed to the next guide in this series to get started with your setup: Setting Up Meals - Step 1 - Adding a Meal
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