Gradelink can tally and total lunch orders and fees. This is appropriate for schools that offer a set of fixed priced meal options to their students.

 

Configure the lunch options on the Daily Attendance Settings page:

  1. Enter a title, abbreviated title, and report legend.
  2. Check the Multi-select and Excluded Attendance options.

Here is an example:


You must also configure a Transaction Type and rate for every lunch option in order to track lunch fees in your financial ledger and generate a Lunch Billing Report.

  1. Click on the Admin tab within the Financial area.
  2. Click on the Fees/Types button.
  3. Add a Fee/Transaction Type for each lunch option that corresponds to the options on the attendance sheet.

The Lunch Billing report will only reflect orders for lunch tally codes that are also associated with Fee/Transaction Types.

 


If you offer a given lunch option at both standard and reduced rates, then you will need to configure more than one row for each rate, as follows:

  1. Create a unique Fee/Transaction Type title for each rate level, for example: “Lunch,” “Lunch (reduced rate),” and “Lunch (free).”
  2. Repeat the Attendance Tally-Lunch Code for each rate level. (These should match the lunch titles on the Attendance Sheet).
  3. Leave the “Lunch Assistance Code” blank on the row for the full, standard rate.
  4. Enter a Lunch Assistance Code for each reduced (or free) rate offered. (For example, “Lunch program-reduced”).

 

Free and reduced fee lunch rates will be billed to eligible students that have these programs specified in the Assistance box of the Documents area under the Main student tab:

 


Each day, have your staff record the student lunch orders within the daily attendance “classes”. If attendance is only tracked class-by-class for some of your grade levels, then you can create a daily attendance class specifically for lunch orders, ignoring the present/absent columns.

 


To run the Lunch Billing Report, go to the Financial tab in the left sidebar, then click on the Reports subtab at the top of the page.  Next, select “Lunch Billing” in the “report to run” selection list, and specify a period or custom date range. Now press the Run/Refresh Report button to render the report for on-screen viewing. Use the disk icon on the report viewer control bar to export the report to Word, PDF or Excel. Because this is typically a wide report, Excel often works best for formatting this report. For printing from Excel, we recommend trying landscape paper orientation and using the Excel printing option to scale the report to “fit all columns on one page.”

 


  1. To post lunch charges to the student ledger, click the Admin sub tab then click the Billing button.
  2. Select a billing period on the left and press the button, “Post/ Refresh Lunch Changes” in the lower right.

You must be in the current, open period to post charges.  If lunch fees are updated by editing custom attendance information within the date range, then you can just press the button again to update the charges. You will want to do this right before closing a month if you use monthly billing cycle for lunch fees.  You could post every day if you want to track this in “real time” and alert parents when they need to buy more lunch credits.  Each time the button is pressed it deletes all previous lunch charges posted within the period and then posts/reposts the latest charges.  The charges may be manually edited or deleted after posting, but such edits could be overwritten by clicking the “Post / Refresh Lunch Charges” button so it is best to make corrections via attendance.