Giving access to Meals to your kitchen, catering staff or cooks

The best way of managing access will depend on whether your catering staff are employed by your school or not.

Option 1 - Adding them as staff

We recommend creating a staff profile for each individual person employed by the school. This allows you to manage permissions and access to Arbor on an individual basis. Follow the instructions in this article: How do I Add a New Staff Member and create a new staff profile? 

Make sure you give them a business role to allow them to log in. We recommend the Cook Business Role to ensure they have the most appropriate permissions - you can always give additional access later if needed using ad hoc permissions.

If the staff member should not be included in the Workforce Census, once you've added the staff member, go to the Contracts section on the left-hand side of their Staff Profile. Click the Include in school workforce census field, and in the slide over, untick the box then click Save Changes.

What can cooks see in the Meals area?

Once you set them up and you have sent them a welcome email, they can log in. They'll have limited permissions to take action, but they can see your school's meal numbers for today by going to School > Meals > Daily Summary.

Click into any underlined numbers on these pages to view a list of students or staff, or download a Meal Sheet of number of meals of each type split by registration form.

Click the View Register button at the bottom of the page to view a breakdown by student, meal type or registration form. Click the Printable Register button to download a PDF of this page.

They can view student allergies and important information alongside student photos from the Dietary Requirements page from the left-hand menu, or use the Dietary Requirements button on the main page.

What are cooks not able to do in the Meals area?

Cooks are not able to take any action in the Meals area, such as changing the setup, managing payments or account balances or adding staff or students to meals. They are also not able to access any meals reporting aside from today's numbers.

If you wanted to give them access to manage payments and balances, or amend the setup, you'd need to give them additional permissions, such as Meals: Administer All Students to set up meals for students or Finance: Administer to set prices for the meals.

Please note that they would then also have access to take action with other areas of Arbor, such as managing account balances for other accounts.

Can we display meals information on a screen?

For safeguarding purposes, we don't recommend you put meal register lists electronically up on a screen. You can use the instructions above to grant certain people access on a computer, but this should not be on a screen visible to students.

Option 2 - Export the information

If your caterers are not employed by your school, you can:

• Follow the above process (making sure to exclude them from your Workforce Census). Please note that they will also have access to some other areas of Arbor, such as being able to view clubs, trips, students enrolments and KPIs on your homepage.
• Export or download our built-in reports to share with them outside of Arbor using the Download button.
• Consider using one of our Cashless Catering integrations (such as Civica or Live Register), and giving them access to that system rather than Arbor.