SIMS Dinner Money (Income Management)
About the Service
SIMS Dinner Money is an additional licensed module within the ESS SIMS suite for dinner money management.
It is an easy-to-use solution to manage, and reports on school meals efficiently. It will help streamline your office processes for recording school meals, monitoring pupil meal choices, charges and payments, while automatically tracking the financial aspects.
What are the benefits?
- SIMS Dinner Money makes reporting simple by integrating with the SIMS modules (e.g., Attendance) already in use within schools. It automatically combines information on pupils and staff, meals and payments, term dates and non-teaching days, and builds letters and reports. A consultant will help you to prepare SIMS for the School or Workforce Census return.
- Simplifies payments, manages banking returns, outstanding monies and refunds easily, all within one system.
- Saves your staff valuable time.
What's Included?
Service Features
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Module Activation | The Dinner Money module requires activation by a module licence key. The installation fee will include activation. |
| Links with SIMS Attendance | Recording a pupil as present in SIMS Attendance will automatically select the default meal choice for that pupil on that day. |
| Communicate meals to the kitchen | Receive data from SIMS Attendance to immediately let your kitchen know how many to cater for, and against which menus. |
| Get dietary requirements right | Customise the menu so your school or academy can create its own meals – you can tailor your menus for healthy eating, specific diets or special occasions. |
| Record and manage UIFSM | SIMS Dinner Money reports can identify Universal Infant Free School Meal (UIFSM) numbers separately from paid and Free School Meals, ensuring that all school records are accurate and reflect changes in government policy. |
|
Record all payment methods |
Record all payments for school dinner money, whether that’s by cash, credit card or cheque. |
|
Monitor and manage debt |
In the case of any outstanding monies, schools are able to set up their own templates for debtor and creditor letters which can be printed and sent to parents. SIMS Dinner Money will generate letters for parents who owe money. |
|
Comprehensive reporting and auditing |
Automatically combine information on pupils, staff, meals, payments, term dates, non-teaching days, and build letters and reports. |
| Upgrades | SIMS Dinner Money is upgraded as part of the main SIMS Upgrade. New features and fixes are detailed in the SIMS upgrade release notes. The upgrade will be managed by SOLUS3. |
| Documentation | "How to" documentation to address changing statutory requirements is included in this service e.g., changes to VAT codes, universal free school meals etc. Documentation is available to schools via our support pages on our website. |