SIMS Agora is our complete online school payment solution, enabling schools to collect payments from parents in a simple, secure and cost-effective way. To help improve this process further, we’ve added seamless integration between SIMS Agora and SIMS Dinner Money, in addition to other cashless catering providers, so schools can ensure their school meal provision is correct, while also improving cash flow and reducing the need for debt chasing.
SIMS Agora Menu integration with SIMS Dinner Money
To provide schools and catering providers with a more efficient and cost effective way to manage school meals, we’ve created a seamless integration between SIMS Dinner Money and SIMS Agora Menus.
As a result, parents now have access to a pre-ordering service, enabling them to select their child’s meals in advance, indicate whether their child will bring a packed lunch or go home for their meal. Schools are now able to publish these menus in advance and place restrictions on when parents must make their choices known.
Thanks to the integration process, these choices are then automatically populated within the school’s dinner register, streamlining the routine and updating kitchen statistics, providing catering staff with early indication of the meal they need to cook.
Menus provide parents with a pre-ordering service to choose meals in advance.
Extra insight for parents
By accessing a child’s dashboard, parents are provided with useful information about whether menus are available for selection. The Menus widget will be highlighted if menu choices are available and schools are able to set dates for selections to be completed as required. If a date has been chosen, it is clearly displayed at the top of the menu and parents are able to make, amend or delete selections up to this date.
In addition, parents can look up their child’s history and check out their previous meal selections using the Meal Purchase History widget.
To make their pre-order selections, parents simply select the type of meal from a drop-down list, where the options are school meal, packed lunch or home. If either packed lunch or home are selected, then no further action is required for the day, whereas choosing school meal opens up the day’s available meal options.
From there, parents have the ability to select a main meal from the relevant options, followed by a dessert, if configured.
SIMS Agora provides round the clock access for parents top their children's accounts.
Round the clock access to update accounts
As SIMS Agora is an online solution, parents have access to the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the ability to manage payments for school meals at their convenience, adding a debit/credit card which is then reflected in SIMS Dinner Money.
From the school’s point of view, payments can be sent directly to their meal provider, thanks to the ability to define a specific bank account that they want debit/credit card, PayPoint and Post Office payments to be directed to, helping to streamline the administration of school meal payment processes. In turn, this creates a more direct solution for parents, who can pay straight into the meal provider’s bank account.
Keeping balances topped up
To help make sure that children always have provision for their meals, schools are able to define a minimum payment threshold – for instance, a school may want to decide that parents must take payments of at least £10 to cover a week’s worth of school meals. In addition, schools can define a low account threshold, at which point parents will receive a notification.
Find out more about how SIMS Agora makes online school payments simple by watching our video, or learn all the key features and benefits of our online payment solution.
Comments
Rosemarie Sumakeita (not verified)
Hi,
With GDPR coming into effect, I am just wondering how robusts Capita’s privacy policies are. My first concern is around safeguarding, considering the amount of information given access to by schools to enable for you to provide school dinner/trips payment facilities.
I am confident that as a large company, you do have extensive date protection and safe guarding policies for your school customers. However, hacking is not a rate occurance anymore, and all systems could be potentially hacked.
In the unfortunate event of such, millions if children’s data including class details, school and more worrying pictures. This would make it very easy for a child to be identified by anyone looking to reach them. M
My question is, why is it necessary for Capita to hold pictures, specific class details and names of pupils at the same time? What extra does the child picture provides? A parent or guardian will update know what their child look like, and does not need reminder on a third party website in order for them to pay for meals or activities. Parent pay provides the same service and does not hold pictures on chicledrem.
I am very concerned about this because I do not believe that parents actually consented to their children’s pictures passed on to a third part service provider.
Can you please let me know why this is, and what the arrangements will be under GDPR. As a pew t using both Agora and Parent Pay, I haven’t consented to this level of detail for my children.
Furthermore, SIMS is designed I a way that only relevant information needs to be accessed by a third party supplier.
Paul Featherstone
Thank you for your enquiry about SIMS and the information that can be held in its database. In the main, personal data from a school is held on a school's own server and network, therefore it is the school's responsibility as the data controller and processor to ensure it is secure and complying to GDPR. It's worth mentioning that just because SIMS has the ability to record a photo of a person, does not mean that the data controller has to add one, SIMS functions just fine without it.
Where a SIMS database is hosted by Capita or any other company, many local authorities offer a hosting solution, then we become a processor and take this responsibility very seriously. We provide all the relevant information and reassurances for our services either directly with a customer as part of the contract of service, or in our dedicated support pages on MyAccount.
Product Manager
Vanessa pearce (not verified)
Hi
I recently put £20 on my sons sims acct and he hasn’t used it yet , but he said he tried to buy a piece of pizza the day before and it said zero money? ( so he had to put it back )
So I went onto his acct and the amount is now £17.45 and £1.25 has been taken for pizza?
Very confused as like I said, I put £20 on and pizza was refused ? Please Please help as there is no help phone number and I don’t want my son not to be able to purchase his lunch??
Kind regards Mrs V Pearce
Nasrin Aziz (not verified)
Hi
We don’t receive any email from sims agora
sims-admin
Hi Vanessa, thanks for getting in touch and apologies for not getting back to you before now. Have you reported this issue to your son's school? If not, you will need to make them aware so that they can in turn report it to our support desk- unfortunately we cannot provide help to individual parents or pupils, I'm afraid. Hope this gets solved for you - please let us know if there's anything else we can do to help.
sims-admin
Hi Nasrin, many thanks for getting in touch - apologies for not getting back to you sooner. Have you checked your email's junk inbox? Sometimes emails can get sent there by accident - if not, you might need to let your school now so that they can report it to their support team if there is a problem.
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