"Has anyone told you that you do a fantastic job!!!!!"

- Krystal Schaier
Foodservice
Iowa Valley Schools

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Password protected, secure access to your dining system from anywhere, any time. That's what you receive when you deploy SDS in your district.

We wanted to make your job easier. No more trips to POS systems around the district. Administer everything centrally with the SDS Admin portal using any computer connected to the internet!

Whether a POS runs live (Central) or standalone (Local), all POS systems check in to update the central database.

Add, edit and remove menu items from POS systems district-wide
Establish low balance warning levels based on student status
Process free and reduced applications, perform audits etc.
Run extensive reports on each student's activity
Put blocks on Breakfast, a la cartes, or overall spending caps per student
Process deposits and make after-the-sale adjustments
Create and save unlimited predefined reports including mandatory state and federal reports
Modify student and family contact information
Enable or disable certain parental portal features

At the center of the School Dining System is a powerful database controlled via the Admin portal.

This database manages student status levels, products, sales and reports. We harnessed the power of Microsoft's SQL Server to provide our customers with the best uptime and performance in the industry.

The Admin portal offers you fingertip access to all data in your system including pending free and reduced applications, transactions at all points of sale and full information on students and families. For this reason, it is securely protected with a password system and optional (but recommended) SSL certificate.

There are numerous reports that provide you with sales and deposit totals in different formats. Most of them can be customized to provide you with the totals that you need in your district. Numbers needed for state and federal reporting are provided, broken down by status then totaled up at the bottom.

Here you have the ability to process your free and reduced applications. Not only will you will be able to process applications based upon income levels, but you will also be able to record numbers for food stamp, TANF, FDPIR, and one user defined value. Additionally, you can tag children as free due to runaway, homeless, or migrant status, or as per administrator. You can also tag those children who are direct certified and perform your audits all within the system.

The Admin portal allows you total control over your POS systems. Using an easy and intuitive interface, you can create POS product categories, add and remove buttons from the POS screens and set pricing and low balance warnings by student status.

The POS control panel allows you to position buttons and color code them to cluster groups together (for example, you could set blue for beverages, green for snacks, etc). The changes are reflected on all POS systems the next time they check in with the Central Server.

Updating student status levels, changing a parent's email address or correcting a deposit are all easy to accomplish on line. The account management area puts you in control of all aspects of student and family accounts. Depending on your needs, you can establish family accounts, where multiple students are under a single parental login - or individual accounts per student. This area also allows you to establish at what levels each student should receive low balance notices at the POS, and when parents should receive low balance notices via mail or email.

In the case of a family account with multiple students, the system aggregates all family members to determine the warning points. The system allows for two warning points.

A "Low" warning point generates a single email to the parent on each day that there continues to be activity in the account. A "Very Low" warning point generates an email to the parent on each day regardless of whether there is continued activity.

Because the system aggregates, if you set the warning level at $5 for a full price student, a family with one full price student would receive their first low balance warning when the balance falls below $5. A family account with three full price students would receive the warning when the balance falls below $15

To maximize performance during peak lunch rush times, the SDS server senses when traffic is heavy at Central mode POS systems and throttles back web access during those periodic spikes. This ensures that students are not left waiting in line because someone at the office ran a very large report right as the lunch rush began.

For schools that keep student information in a master SIS (Student Information System), the School Dining System can bridge data from the SIS, allowing a newly enrolled student to automatically appear at the POS systems on their first day. Contact an SDS sales representative for more information on this capability.

For schools that do not use a SIS, SDS can be told to automatically sense based on eating patterns which students are assigned to which buildings. This makes it easy for a new system to go "live" without anyone having to educate it about the building associations for each student. This feature can be enabled, or disabled, at any time.

Next Page: Configuration Options