Can we delete a meal?

School staff cannot delete a meal directly. Instead, they can either keep the meal for the current year without using it or remove all meal setup steps. The process involves removing students' meal choices, deleting scheduled sitting sessions, and then contacting Arbor Support for deletion. 

Please note: Incomplete steps will prevent meal removal due to generated payment invoices. Staff will need to ensure all steps have been completed before contacting Arbor Support.

Permissions

• Meals: Administer All Students - Remove meal choices
• School: Teaching: Administer - Delete timetable slots

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

Ending a Meal

Once set up, it isn't possible for school staff to delete a meal. If you instead want to delete a meal provision, visit the How do I delete a meal provision section of this article.

If you are keeping the meal setup, but not using it, you'll also need to ensure you end all timetabled sittings to ensure no more meal registers are generated.

This can be done via the following steps:

1. Head to School > Meals > Setup and click into Meal Sittings Scheduled on your meal setup
2. Click into one of the timetable slots and select Edit 
3. Set an End Date to be either the day that you're on, or a previous date
4. Select Save Changes 
5. Repeat for each timetable slot
 

If you have set up a meal in School > Meals > Setup and want to delete it, you will not be able to click the Delete Meal button.

There are two options for resolving this:

• Keep the meal for this year but do not use it. You will be able to choose to not copy it over into next year as part of your New School Year Setup - Recommended
   
• Remove the whole meal setup - Not recommended; only to be used if the meal was setup by mistake, or never used.

Deleting a Meal

If you choose to delete the whole meal setup, please ensure you complete all of the steps below before contacting Arbor Support for deletion:

Step 1 - Remove students' meal choices

The first step is to remove all the meal choices for all students in the meal registers connected to the meal setup you want to delete.

The only way to delete meal choices completely is from the student's profile. You would not be able to do this in bulk. 

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Meals section in the student's profile on the left side of the page.
2. Click on the Historic Attendance tab
3. Tick the boxes next to the meals you want to delete, click Bulk Action, and then select Bulk Delete.

Note: If you're deleting a lot of meal choices, please allow time between each bulk deletion for the system to effectively remove the choices.
 

Step 2 - Delete the scheduled sitting sessions

Go to School > Meals > Setup > Meal Sittings Scheduled. Click into the scheduled session and click Edit.

Click the Delete Timetable Slot button, then confirm the deletion.

You'll need to repeat this for each scheduled slot.

Note: If the system needs to remove a lot of timetabled sessions, the slot may stay in Deleting. You can refresh the page to see if this has completed, and the slot will be removed entirely once finished.
 

Step 3 - Delete the meal

Once all of the above steps have been completed, please contact the Arbor Support Team and provide code 1032 if supported by Arbor, or your Support Partner if not supported by Arbor. Send details of the meal you would like to delete. We will then remove this for you.

We will not remove the meal if you have not completed the above process, as payment invoices will have been generated. 

Please send us: 

• The full name of the Meal as shown on your Arbor site
• A link to your Meals page - this is the URL or long string of text at the top of your page