Rotating Meal Menus - Managing Meal Menus

This article provides guidance on managing Meal Menus once you have set these using the earlier guides in this series. This guide takes you through adding, editing and viewing meal choices, and making edits to your menus once you have started using them.

This article is the fifth 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

Managing and editing choices

Logging meal choices

Once you've set up Meal Menus, you'll no longer have Regular Meal Choices for students. So that students are charged correctly with the right price, you'll need to make sure either that:

• Your staff can select the meal the child will have in the meal registers on the day.
  • You can see how to do this as an Admin in the How can I change the meal choice for students for one day? section of this FAQ article.
  • Or as a Teacher here.
• Guardians log their children's choices through the Parent Portal or Parent App prior to the meal: Meal Menu choices on the Parent Portal or Parent App

The only way to add a future meal choice is through the Parent Portal; staff can only make edits for children once the meal register opens on the day of the meal. To get around this, you would need to sign in as a guardian to the parent portal and complete the meal choice for them as if you were them.

Viewing meal choices

Staff can see the meal choices students have made on the day on the meal register.

Meal registers can be accessed via:

• School > Meals > Meals > Meal Sittings > Daily Summary, and then click the green View Register button.
• The Meals section on the left-hand side of Lesson Dashboards 

You can find our detailed guidance on your reporting options here: Reporting on Rotating Meal Menu choices

To report on meal choices in advance of the day of the meal, you will need to use the Customer Report Writer (School > Custom Report Writer) to create a report with the report focus Parent Portal Meal Choices. For more details on this, please refer to our Reporting on future meal menu choices in advance guide.

Managing and editing menus

Once you have created a menu, you might need to make changes, for example, you might need to remove a meal option or end your menu early so you can restart it after a holiday. The following sections will walk you through this.

Making changes to your menu

To edit a meal menu:

• 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 edit
• Click on View meal menu
• Make your edits in the table and use the tabs to switch between weeks
• Click Save Changes to confirm your changes

If your menu is not active yet (in other words, the Available from date is in the future), you can edit both the menu itself and the availability.

If the menu is active or is a past menu (in other words, the Available from date has passed), you can edit the menu's availability, but you cannot edit the menu itself. Clicking on View meal menu will show you which items are included in the menu; you just won't be able to edit them.

In light of this, to edit an active or old menu, you need to take these steps first:

• Click on Edit availability
• Change the Menu available from date to a future date
• Ensure the Menu available to date is a date after the from date
• Click Save Changes

Once you have made your edits to the menu, set your availability dates back to the original dates 

Changing availability details

To edit a meal menu's availability:

• 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 edit
• Click on Edit availability to open the slide over
• Make your changes on the slide over (see how the different options on this slide-over work here: Rotating Meal Menus - Making a Menu available)
• Click Save Changes to confirm your edits

The next and last guide in this series is: Rotating Meal Menus - Frequently Asked Questions