Our NPD team regularly undertake customer research to ensure our products continue to meet their needs.
Upon discovering the lengthy and manual task school catering teams endured to process refunds, we developed our new e-catering portal, making processing refunds a quick and easy task.
What was the issue?
In circumstances 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 with a significant margin for error (and potential financial loss) due to limited information available to the caterer.
How does the refund portal work?
The catering refund portal creates one list of all the refund requests for each school. Caterers can see 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, this allows the caterer’s finance team to approve or decline the refund requests - safe in the knowledge that it is 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 this product, if you would like to learn more about simplifying refunds, please contact us.
