Can we prevent a student's Meals account going into debit?

Whether or not you can prevent a student's meal account from going into debt will depend on the way you have set up the Meal in Arbor. If you have created Rotating Meal Menus that are available for parents and guardians to select in advance via the Parent Portal or App, then you will be able to prevent this from happening.

Important note: If you choose to prevent parents and guardians from selecting meal choices if there is not enough balance, the school can still select meals for students with insufficient balances, therefore putting the account into debt. 

Permissions

• Meals: Administer All Students - Make changes to Meal Menu availability

If you don't have the relevant permission, ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

Our school does not use Rotating Meal Menus

If you are not using the Rotating Meal Menu feature in Arbor, it isn't possible to prevent account balances from going below £0.00, or to limit the amount of debt parents can accrue against the account to a certain number.

Our school does use Rotating Meal Menus

When setting up your Rotating Meal Menu (see this article: Rotating Meal Menus: Introduction), you will be able to prevent parents and guardians from booking meal choices for their child if they do not have enough balance in their Meals account.

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, which helps prevent meal debt.

• Set this to "Yes, allow meal choices to be made" to enable parents to select meals regardless of their balances.
• Set this to "No, prevent meal choices until payment is made" to prevent parents from making meal choices when their child's meal balance is insufficient to cover the cost of the choice. 

If the Prevent setting is used, parents will still be able to see the menu and select a menu item in the portal if they have insufficient balance, but their choices will not be confirmed until they make a payment to cover the difference between the available balance and the cost of their future meal bookings, thus stopping parents from going into a negative balance.