Our NPD team regularly undertake customer research to ensure our products continue to meet their needs. Solving the lengthy and manual task school catering teams endure to process refunds. We developed our new catering management portal, making processing refunds a quick and easy task.
What was the issue?
Where caterers look after multiple schools, it is not unusual for a member of their finance team to spend the whole day manually processing each refund separately, especially towards the end of term. The task comprised many steps and caterers are totally reliant on schools providing correct data to initiate the refund. All very time-consuming. There is also a significant margin for error (and potential financial loss) due to limited information available to the caterer.
How does the school caterer management portal work?
You can process all refund requests for each school in the catering management portal. The system creates one list showing: the school, pupil name, amount of refund and balance in that account with approve or decline buttons.
Importantly, the system will only allow a refund, when there is a refundable amount. So caterer’s finance teams can approve or decline the refund requests – safe in the knowledge that it’s impossible to refund a negative balance.
- Parents now request refunds directly, taking the school completely out of the equation.
- There is a full audit trail, and automated confirmation emails are sent to parents.
Want to know more?
We have now successfully launched our school caterer management portal. If you would like to learn more about simplifying refunds, please contact us.
Read our case study
