The questions and answers in this article are intended to help you prepare for contactless food service in the upcoming school year.
This is a living document that is continually updated as new information becomes available.
Barcode Scanners
This option makes it possible for students to purchase items without touching the PIN pad.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Do I have to use the pre-order feature to do no contact food service with barcode scanners? | No. Barcode scanners can be used without pre-ordering meals. |
| Does Infinite Campus provide barcode scanners? | Infinite Campus and our partners have scanners available for sale. Please contact your Client Executive for more information. |
| Can meals be purchased with the Student ID? | No, scanning must be done with the Food Service PIN. However, Campus does have a process for setting the student ID as PIN. If student PINs are the same as their student number, a terminal equipped with a 2D scanner can read the student's barcode from their mobile device and process the transaction. This feature was made available in Campus.2032 and eliminates the need to distribute a paper barcode and allows contactless payment. |
| Does the student's Food Service PIN Display as a barcode? | Yes, student's Food Service PINs are now available as a barcode in Campus Student and Campus Parent. Students and parents can use the barcode to make Food Service purchases. To make the barcode display in Campus Student and Campus Parent, mark the checkbox called "Display Food Service PIN Barcode on Today screen" found in the Display Options tool in the Portal Preferences. This feature was made available in Campus.2036. |
| When is the student's food service account charged? | When the meals that the patron has received are entered in the Point of Sale. Once the meal is processed through the Point of Sale, the parent can see the details for the purchase in Campus Parent. |
| Will there be an option to have a barcode for the meal served? | At this time, we are not able to use barcodes to enter items in the Point of Sale. Barcodes are only used to identify students. |
| Does the barcode work for more than one day? | Yes. Since the barcode is the student's PIN, each barcode always stays the same for the student unless you manually change their PIN. |
| Can I print the barcodes directly onto a card/badge? | If you plan to print the barcodes directly onto a card/badge, you must use the 3 of 9 Barcode Font and make sure the barcode is not bold. See the Create a Barcode List topic for more information. |
Pre-order Using Campus School Store
This option supports parents being able to pre-order lunch via the new Campus School Store. Food Service employees can generate an export of these orders which can be used to create labels to be affixed to lunches as they are packed for delivery.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is there an additional cost for using the School Store for pre-ordering meals? | No. This feature is available for free if you are a Campus Food Service or Online Payments customer. There are additional costs if you choose to buy barcode scanners or need to add Food Service to your product list within Campus. |
| Can I use the pre-order feature if I am not an Online Payments customer? | Yes; however, you cannot charge for meals or products if you are not an Online Payments customers. All meals and products listed in the Store Store will only allow for $0.00 amounts. |
Can students pre-order if they have a documented allergy? | Yes, but this requires purchase options that indicate which meals have potential allergens or provide purchase options that explicitly state they are allergy-free. |
| How far in advance do lunches need to display in the School Store? | You can decide how far in advance and how close to service time you want to allow parents to pre-order by using the start and end date for the item in the store. |
| When is the student's food service account charged? | Food items purchased through the School Store are NOT linked to the student's food service account. To deduct a food service purchase, you must manually record the purchase on the student's account. |
| Are meals pre-ordered in the School Store added to the Edit Check report? | No. School Store purchases are not attached to a Food Service account and therefore do not appear in the Edit Check report. |
| Can Ad Hoc filters be used to specify meals that are available or restrict purchasing to specific students? | Yes, any data available in Ad Hoc can be used for filtering. |
| How is money deposited to the school if I am an Online Payments customer? | If you use Online Payments, this is accomplished through the "Product Type" you link to the bank account you wish the proceeds to be deposited into. If you do not use Online Payments, your current food service funding methods will continue. |
| Can parents pre-order meals and not pay for them? | Yes, you can set up items as $0. Using this option, you can charge the student's food service account later by having cafeteria staff ring the transaction at the point of sale. |
| Can teachers order in the School Store for their classroom? | No. Campus has a tool called Lunch Counts where you can record pre-order counts when doing attendance. But this feature is limited to a meal count, milk count or adult meal count. We have it on our road map to increase the functionality of this count to allow for counting of more than the three items. |
| Will families with multiple students be able to confirm what they ordered before submitting their order? | Yes, the checkout screen allows you to see all the items ordered and to whom the order belongs. |
| Can a parent edit a pre-ordered meal in the case of an absent child? | The parent could call the office and return the item. When this is done, the purchase is removed from the Pick List. |
| Does the School Store support multiple languages? | You can setup store items filtered with ad hoc filters by home language. |
| Can we set products to be ordered only once per student? Or might parents be able to pre-order the same item multiple times? | Yes, parents may be able to duplicate an order for a student on a particular day. You can set a preference to not do this; however, you would have to set up new products every week. |
| Does Infinite Campus provide labels? | Infinite Campus will provide an export feature for you to use as a mail merge to generate labels. In a subsequent release, Infinite Campus will format a report that you can use to directly print Avery 8395 labels. However, Infinite Campus does not provide the physical labels on which you print. |
Class Serve
This option allows you to record meals or snacks distributed to students so that items can be deducted from students' food service accounts.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can Class Serve be used for pre-ordering lunches? | No. Class Serve is used to record meals or snacks distributed to students in their class. |
| When is the student's food service account charged? | The student's food service account is charged at the time the transaction is recorded in Class Serve. |
| Can a Food Service office staff or kitchen manager pull up Class Serve and make those selections that charge the students? | No, not through Class Serve. Access is driven by the teacher assigned to a period. |
Edit Check Reporting
The purpose of an Edit Check is to compare each school's daily counts of free, reduced and paid lunches against the number of eligible students based on attendance for that day.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| If students don't eat in a cafeteria, how do we ensure the Edit Check Report is correct? | Meals still need to be rung up through the Point of Sale when they pre-order. This ensures only students receiving meals are charged and ensures the Edit Check Report is correct. |
| Are meals purchased in the School Store added to the Edit Check report? | No. School Store purchases are not attached to a Food Service account. |
Miscellaneous
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Bulk Entry | |
| Is there an option for bulk entry of meals served? | The Tally Meal Entry tool provides the ability to record the number of meals served to students, as a total count, according to the school in which they are enrolled. This tool was added with Campus.2048. The Multi-Day Serve option on the Point of Sale allows you to enter meals on different days using a single transaction on the point of sale. This eliminates the need for meals distributed in bulk to be manually entered on each day. Eligibility rules are still followed and meals can still be verified using the Edit Check report. Students are charged for the meals on the day the meal was meant to be served to them, not necessarily on the day they received the meal. Multi-Day Serve can be run with the terminal offline or online. This option was added with Campus.2052. |
| Virtual Students | |
| Is there a way to serve virtual students from one site and have them report correctly in another site? | Assuming your virtual students are in a particular course or courses, you can use it to build an Ad Hoc filter for the menu you plan to have available for them. However, Campus cannot record that their purchase was picked up at a different site. It also depends on how you have the Point of Sale application set up. The rules for which schools report the meal remains the same as outlined in the Edit Check report today regardless of where the student physically picks up the meal. For example, if a student is enrolled at the middle school but all meals for the district are picked up at the elementary school, you could set the system up so the meal is reported under the middle school and not the elementary school. |
| Continuous Serve | |
| How do you get to the correct set of barcodes to print for Continuous Serve? | If you are using pre-ordering, the barcode will be associated to the student PIN with the order. If you want to use barcodes for all students regardless of pre-order status, there is a PIN report in Campus that allows you to print a list of PINs as barcodes. |
| Ala Carte Items | |
| If I set up ala carte items in the School Store and charge upon ordering, are they charged to the parent's payment method and not their meal account? | Correct. As a result, Ala Carte items purchased through the School Store do not show up on Point of Sale reports. |
| Releases | |
| Which Campus update will my district need to get these features and reporting? | We'll be working with your Client Exec for each state to try to encourage earlier adoption of releases to take advantage of these features. We anticipate the data export being in 2032, reports to follow. |
