School Allows Parents To Buy Lunch For Kids Online Visa Credit Card

High-tech has finally reached Australian schools. As a solution to the steady decline of parent volunteers in Australian schools some of them are turning to technology to keep up with school lunches.

A WA school, Harmony Primary School in Atwell is currently testing a new ordering system that reduces the workload for volunteers in their canteen and allows parents to deposit lunch money in advance with the help of a debit or credit card.

The system allows parents to be better organised too because they order in up to one week of lunches for their kids in advance .

Each morning the school canteen receives a printout telling them how many lunches need to be prepared and once they are, they get labelled with stickers to be delivered to the right kid.

Natalie Machin, Harmony P&C president said the system, which only started last week, was already saving canteen volunteers at least an hour a day.

Staff no longer need to manually collect change from dozens of brown paper bags. They also won’t need to calculate the number of sandwiches and sausage rolls required. With the new system they can have a printout ready within seconds saving them a lot of time chasing orders.

In terms of costs, the new system adds 20¢ to the cost of each lunch order and cost the school 3 per cent of total sales.

The NSW-based company FlexiSchools started this online ordering system about 18 months ago, and its operations manager Colin King said it was operating in 80 schools across the country.

Ms Machin told press Harmony was willing to try the new system for a term before making a final decision. According to sources it had already taken off ‘like wildfire,’ even with parents who were not familiar with computers.

Source: The Newest

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