When do I use Meal Cards or Meal Sheets?

SchoolInsight meal cards and sheets help reduce labor and speed up the lunch line. They are used at the point of sale (POS) to scan student orders. Meal cards are distributed for individual students; whereas, meal sheets include many students and are kept at the POS.

Meal cards could be used as ID cards if you add student pictures and other information. They are used for upper grades. Each student brings their card to the lunch line, the staff scans it, and selects items on the student’s tray.

Here is a sample of meal cards:

Meal sheets include multiple students at once. They are used for lower grades because younger students may lose their meal cards. These students go through the lunch line by homeroom or grade level and their meal sheets are printed similarly. As students go through the lunch line, the staff finds the student by name or picture and scans them to enter their food items on the tray.

Here is a sample meal sheet:

To speed up the process further, this meal sheet includes multiple food item barcodes per student. Scanning such a barcode creates a fee for the selected food item and student. This time saving feature is also available on meal cards.

We hope you know if you would like to use meal cards or sheets by now. Continue reading further to learn how to generate them:

• Meal Cards
• Meal Sheets

SchoolInsight uses Code128 barcodes. Take a note of this when purchasing a scanner.

Meal Cards

Generate meal cards and distribute them to students in order to scan student food orders in the lunch line. Meal cards can speed up the food distribution process for larger schools, upper grade levels, and do not require staff to know each student.

Additionally, you can use meal cards in lieu of student ID cards by adding student pictures and some additional data.

To generate meal cards:

1. Go to Admin Main > Lunch > Meal Cards
2. Select Users to Print
3. Options
• Choose to include future students
• (Optional) include a food item on the barcode. This will link the order to a particular food item for each user.
4. Fields to Show
• (Optional) Include other desired information to be displayed on the card, such as Student Picture
5. Sort
• Choose the order in which students will be printed
6. Print Options
• Choose your desired printing output. Within the Mailing Labels option, the CR80 Card format is available to facilitate printing ID Cards fashion.
7. Generate

Here is a sample result of the meal cards report (in CR80 Card). After printing you can distribute the cards.

Meal Sheets

Meal sheets are kept at POS, and scanned when processing the lunch line. It is widely used for lower grade level students, because they may damage or lose meal cards. Many schools include student pictures and use individual food item barcodes to speed up the lunch line.

To generate meal sheets:

1. Go to Admin Main > Lunch > Meal Sheets
2. Select Users to Print
3. Options
• Choose to include future students
4. Show Barcode(s)?
• Choose to show user barcodes
• Choose to show food item barcodes
5. Show Food Items
• Choose which food items to include
6. Sort
• Choose the order in which students will be printed
7. Print Options
• Edit name order or include student pictures
• Choose barcode arrangement
• Choose page layout
8. Generate

Here is a sample meal sheet. If I scan the Cold Lunch food item next to Thomas, then SchoolInsight will create a fee for a Cold Lunch for Thomas. This saves time which would have been used to click and choose the student or the individual items on his tray while processing the lunch line.