Catering Numbers - Allow pass types to include numbers

It would be helpful to separate a student’s location/pass status from their catering status.

Currently, when a student is on a pass during a scheduled meal time, they are removed from the standard catering count. However, in a boarding school, being signed out of the boarding house (depending on the pass) does not necessarily mean the student does not require a boarding meal.

I would like the ability to configure individual Pass Types with a setting such as “Include in Catering Numbers” or “Requires Standard Meals.”

It would also be useful to have a simple meal option such as “Requires Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner”, rather than meal requests being limited to Early or Late meals. Ideally, this could be set as a default for a particular Pass Type and automatically feed into the Catering totals.

Who is this feature for?

Boarding/Residential staff, Catering Staff, and Orah administrators

Platform

Mobile Phone, Desktop, Tablet, Browser Extension

What problem would this new feature help your school solve?

How often does this problem happen?

Daily

Describe the impact on your school if this problem remains unsolved?

Our Catering Manager relies on Orah’s Catering numbers to determine how many meals need to be prepared. We use passes to accurately record where boarding students are throughout the day. For example, students may be signed out of boarding to School, Exams, Tutorials or another school-based activity, but they still require their normal boarding meals. At present, Orah interprets being on a pass as being away for catering purposes and removes those students from the standard meal count. This means their location information can be correct while the resulting catering information is incorrect. We need to be able to say: “This student is away from the boarding house, but still requires their normal meal.” How often does this problem happen? Daily. Our boarding students are signed out to school as part of their normal daily routine, so this can affect catering numbers every school day. It can also occur with exams, tutorials, school activities and other passes where students are away from the boarding house but still require meals. Describe the impact on your school if this problem remains unsolved The main impact is that we cannot rely solely on Orah’s Catering totals to calculate meal numbers accurately. Staff have to manually account for students who are on particular passes but still require meals, or maintain the information separately in another system such as a spreadsheet. This creates duplicated administration and increases the possibility of human error, incorrect catering numbers, food shortages or unnecessary food waste. More importantly, it reduces the benefit of having an integrated platform. We would like Orah to be our single source of truth for student location and catering requirements. If catering numbers have to be manually recalculated or managed in separate software, it defeats much of the purpose of using Orah to automate this process.

Please list any other tools or platforms that you know of that offer similar functionality.

Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Documents that allow us to create our own tables

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Upvoters

Status

In Review

Board

General

Date

About 2 hours ago

Author

TeAni Solomon

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