Rotating Meal Menus - Making a Menu available

This article provides instructions on how to make Rotating Meal Menus in Arbor available and is part of a series. This guide takes you through how availability dates work, how to set cut-off times for parents making changes and how menu start dates interact with your meal menu's rotation.

This article is the fourth in a series of six. The other guides in this series are:

1. Rotating Meal Menus - Introduction
2. Rotating Meal Menus - Setting up a Menu
3. Rotating Meal Menus - Adding Provisions to Menus
4. Rotating Meal Menus - Making a Menu available
5. Rotating Meal Menus - Managing Meal Menus
6. Rotating Meal Menus - Frequently Asked Questions

Making a meal menu available

To make a menu available:

• Head to School > Meals > [on the left-hand side] Setup
• Click on Meal Menus under the relevant meal's heading
• Find the meal menu you want to make available
• Click on Edit availability to open a Parent Portal Menu Availability slide over
• Choose your settings
• Click Save Changes to confirm your change

The next sections break down the different settings on the Parent Portal Menu Availability slide-over.

Parent Portal Availability 

The Parent Portal Availability section allows you to control when this menu should be available and lets you specify if parents can make meal choices if they do not have a sufficient balance in their child's meal account. You can also edit this after it has been created if you need to make any adjustments.

It is not possible to have multiple menus within the same Meal that have overlapping dates. Should you wish to have different meal menus for different years, you'll need to set up separate Meals in the Meal Setup area.

To change availability dates for your menu, use the Menu Available from and to fields. The rules of the Availability date settings are as follows:

• If no availability dates are set at all, parents will not be able to see the menu on the Parent Portal
• If the date in the Menu available to is in the past, the menu does not show on the Parent Portal
• If ongoing or future dates are set, parents can see the menu on the Portal
• If the date in the Menu available to is in the past, the menu does not show on the parent portal
• The Menu available from date is the first day for which parents can select a meal choice from the menu
• The Menu available to date is the last day for which parents can select a meal choice from the menu
• The Menu available from date determines when your meal menu rotations start
  • This date determines which menu is week A, and thus determines which one is week B and so forth.
  • Arbor's meal menu weeks run from Monday to Sunday, so Meal menus that start on a Sunday, for example, will move to week B on the next day (the Monday). 
    
    This means it is often best not to start your new menu during a weekend, but to start it on the first weekday (Monday to Friday) of the week that will use Menu A.
• Menus keep rotating even if the school is closed (for example, during the Easter break), so even if your menu is not strictly available to be used for a week because you do not have any sittings scheduled during that time, your menu will still have rotated by a week.

Use the Allow Meal choices if not enough balance? dropdown to set whether parents can make meal choices even if their child's meal balance is not enough to cover the price of the meal choice.

• Set this to Yes, allow meal choices to be made, to allow parents to make meal choices regardless of balances
• Set this to No, prevent meal choices until payment is made, to stop parents from making meal choices when their child's meal balance is not enough to cover the cost of the choice.
  • If this setting is used, parents will still be able to see the menu and select a menu item in the portal, but their choices will not save, and the choice they just made will revert to No choice selected.
  • Parents will need to top up the Meals account by enough to cover the price of the choice and re-add the choice after doing this to change this from No choice selected.

Meal Choice Cut-Off Times

The Set Meal Choice Cut-Off Times section lets you control when parents can make meal choices online via the Parent Portal or App.

The Meal choice cut-off time period and cut-off time fields work together, allowing you to select hours, days, or weeks, along with a specific number.

Your chosen combination sets the cut-off.

For instance, if you set the cut-off time period to Days and the cut-off time to 2, parents can make meal choices until 2 days before the Meal Sitting.

Leave this section blank to allow parents to choose up until the meal starts.

You cannot set different cut-offs for different days. For example, to ensure all meal choices for Mondays are completed by the weekend, you might set a 3-day cut-off, which will apply to all days.

This concludes the main setup portion of our series of guides on Rotating Meal Menus. The next guide in this series is Rotating Meal Menus - Managing Meal Menus.