Student has been charged the wrong amount for meals

This article provides steps to resolve issues with incorrect meal charges for students, focusing on ensuring proper setup for Free School Meals (FSM) and Universal Free School Meals (UFSM), checking FSM eligibility, and adjusting meal prices for non-FSM students.

You might notice in your Meal Balance reports that accounts have been debited when they shouldn't have been, or have been debited incorrectly for meals. You can follow the steps in this article to resolve this for past and future meals.

FSM and UFSM

Step 1 - Check your FSM Meal Prices

To ensure your FSM and UFSM students aren't charged for meals, you need to make sure you've set up:

• Free School Meals - Any student where this is set on their profile
• Universal Free School Meals - Add a price and select that it applies to students in Year 1, Year 2 and Reception
• All other students/staff - for students who are not FSM or UFSM

You can see how to do this here: Add pricing

Step 2 - Check FSM eligibility

If students who should have Free School Meals are being charged for meals, first check their FSM eligibility is current. 

You can do this from the Background section of their student profile. Add or edit their eligibility to ensure they are charged nothing for meals: Adding Free School Meal (FSM) Eligibility

Top Tip: You won't need to do this if the student is set as Universal Free School Meals (UFSM). To see how a student is recorded as UFSM, see this guidance.

Meal Prices for non-FSM students

If students have been charged the wrong amount and aren't FSM students, got to School > Meals > Setup > Prices and select the Meal Provision. Check the students linked to each price.

For example, I've left Year 3 out of the Junior price, so they'd be charged £2.50 rather than £3. To change this you would set the price as inactive and add a new one.

You'll also want to click into the prices to make sure they apply to all the dates students should be charged this price. If not, you would set the price as inactive and add a new one.