Setting Up Meals - Step 5 - Managing Attendees

This guide takes you through the fifth step to setting up a meal in Arbor, adding students to your meal sitings. This guide shows you how to automatically add students to a sitting based on their class/form group, how to manually add students as attendees, how to remove incorrectly added attendees and how to make changes to your already added attendees.

This guide is the sixth 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

Adding Attendees

Students you add to a sitting are referred to as the sitting's attendees. 

This part adds students to the meal registers to enable teachers to mark students in certain classes down for each meal. If you don't complete this step, you won't have any students in your meal registers!

You can add students to a sitting as part of a group, or individually; both options are outlined below.

Adding attendees based on their class or form

You can bulk add attendees to a sitting by making a form group automatic participants, allowing you to include all students in a form at once.

To add a form group:

• Go to School > Meals > Setup.
• Click on Attendees, the fifth option under your meal's heading.
• Select the 'Automatic Group Attendees' tab.
• Click the green +Add button for the desired sitting.
• In the slide-over, choose the class(es) to enrol from the dropdown.
  • Use Ctrl + A or Command + A on your keyboard after clicking the dropdown to select all classes at once.
  • Select classes individually by clicking them in the dropdown
• Click Add Automatic Attendees to confirm your selections.

Repeat these steps to distribute students across multiple sittings.

As you can see from the example below, once you have added your groups, your Automatic Group Attendees tab resembles a list of each of your meal sittings with the student groups you have assigned to each sitting nested below the name of the sitting.
 

Adding individual attendees

In addition to adding students to a sitting as a part of a group, you can also add them individually.

To add students individually:

• Go to School > Meals > Setup.
• Click on Attendees, the fifth option under your meal's heading.
• Select the 'Students Without Regular Meal Patterns' tab.
• In the table, click on the name of the student you want to add
• On the slideover, check and adjust your settings:
  • Set the Meal Sitting you would like to add them to in the top dropdown
  • Specify the days of the week they need to be added. This defaults to Monday to Friday.
  • Set the Effective date and End date - these are the dates between which the student will appear on the meal register of your Sitting.
• Click the green Save Changes button

Repeat these steps to add more students to Sittings one by one.

Managing Attendees and making changes

Once you have started adding your attendees, you might need to make some adjustments. For instance, you might want to move a student to a different Sitting than the rest of their class, or you might want to remove them from a sitting on a specific day of the week, or completely.

Making changes

To make changes to a student's meal attendance pattern for future sittings:

• Go to School > Meals > Setup.
• Click on Attendees, the fifth option under your meal's heading.
• Head to the Meal Patterns tab
• Click on the name of the student you want to adjust
• Click the orange Edit button.
• Make your changes on the slide over:
  • To change the sitting they will attend, use the Meal Sitting dropdown
  • To change the days of the week they attend, use the Days of Week tickboxes
  • To change the dates between which they automatically get added to a register, change the Effective and/or End Dates
• To confirm your changes, click the green Save Changes button

Removing attendees

To remove individual students from future meal sittings:

• Go to School > Meals > Setup.
• Click on Attendees, the fifth option under your meal's heading.
• Head to the Meal Patterns tab.
• Click on the name of the student you want to remove.
• Click the orange Edit button.
• Click the red Remove Meal Pattern button
• Confirm the removal of the Remove meal pattern? pop-up by using the red Remove button.

To remove a whole class:

• Go to School > Meals > Setup.
• Click on Attendees, the fifth option under your meal's heading.
• Head to the Automatic Group Attendees tab.
• Click on the class/form you want to remove.
• Click the red Remove Automatic Attendees button on the slideover
• Confirm the removal by pressing the red Yes, Delete button on the Delete record? popup.

Seeing students who have not been added to a sitting

Once you have started adding students or classes to your sittings, you might want to check if any students still need to be allocated a sitting or how many students have not been allocated sittings.

You can do this by heading to the Students Without Regular Meal Patterns tab.

On this page, you see all of the students in your school who have not been allocated a sitting within your Meal listed in a table. The columns of the table also list which Year Groups and Form Groups those students are in and highlight any Dietary Requirements they might have.

To see the total number of students who have not been allocated a sitting, refer to the Showing x results text to the left, just below the table. X being the number of students without a sitting allocated.

Once you're happy with your Attendees, you will have completed your basic meal setup!

You are now ready to move on to the next step and the next guide in this series: Setting Up Meals - Optional - Regular Meal Choices. 

Or, if you do not plan to use Regular Meal Choices, head to Setting Up Meals - Frequently Asked Questions and Further Reading for additional guidance.