Contact us
The first thing you need to do is contact us through our contact form. We will then set up a webinar demo with you. Usually we hold the webinars on Mondays at 1:00pm Mountain time.
Once you have signed up with us you will be provided with two URLs. One URL will be for your administration area, and the other will be given out to your clients to order hot lunch from you.
Log in to your personalized administration area
The administration area is the central hub to manage your food service operation. From here you will define all of your meals, pricing, and menus, manage your users, generate reports, view metrics and much more.
Customize the system with extensive configuration
The configuration section lets you enter in your business name and address which will be displayed to your users when they access your site.
Here's where it gets interesting. At Hot Lunch Online we have the concept of configurable Entity, Division, Account, and User names. An Entity contains any number of Divisions, and an Account contains any number of Users. In a typical school food service setup, the Entity = "School", Division = "Grade", Account = "Parent" and User = "Student". If we wanted to use Hot Lunch Online for a Hospital we could make Entity = "Hospital", Division = "Floor", Account = "Patient", User = "User". It's practically limitless, and gives our system a distinct advantage over the competition. To make it easier on everyone, the rest of this document will refer to Entities as "Schools" and Divisions as "Grades".
Create your meals
In Hot Lunch Online you can create any number of meals in the system. You can categorize your meals to assist in finding your meals quickly. You build your meal once, then you can place it on any menu as many times as you'd like and track it's popularity.
You can also create meal "addons". Which are things like "milk" or "juice" which may be purchased optionally along with a meal for that day. Addons too, are tracked for popularity amongst your users
Create your menus
The menu creator pulls from your pre-compiled list of meals and addons, and allows you to place any number of them on a calendar day. It's simple, intuitive interface allows you to create your menu quickly.
Since schools have different holiday schedules, activities, and days off, you are able to create a unique menu for every school in your system.
To make it easier on you, you can create a "master" menu for a given month, which you can then import to each school and modify it as desired.
Manage your users
Being able to easily find, and answer questions about users in your system is vital for gaining confidence from your user base. We provide a fully searchable index of the users in the system. You can search by login, first name, last name or email. You can also filter your results by School to narrow it down even further.
By simply clicking on a user, you're able to see an overview of the user in question. Full contact information, order history, what meal pricing scheme the user falls into, and more.
You're also able to see what account this user is under, since multiple users fall under one account. A good analogy is that an account is a "family" with a login and password. The users are then "children", which are tied to the "family". So mom or dad logs in with the account login/password, and orders meals for all of the children in one swoop. No more hassle with a different login/password for every child.
Manage your accounts
Similar to users, you can search through the accounts in the system easily. Search by login, or email address to find the account you need.
Once you find the account you want, and click on it, you're presented with an overview of the account. You're also shown the recent payment activity associated with the account, and the list of users who are under the account.
This is also where you would go to reset a password for someone. The passwords are not stored in plain text in the database, so you could never look up someone's password for them. The best you can do for them is to reset it.
Schools, Grades and Locations
You can define any number of Schools in the system. A School can have any number of Locations beneath it. So say for example a School has two different campuses, each would be defined with it's own address. Then the Grades are tied to the locations.
Meal pricing can be defined at the School level, or overridden at the Grade level.
Powerful reporting
Reporting is one of the most important aspects of food service. Instead of compiling the production reports by hand, you just select a date range and click a button with our system.
We produce Excel files for production related reports, PDF's for reports that get sent to your Schools, and CSV's for creating labels or mail merges.
Useful Metrics
Curious as to what your most profitable month was? What's your most popular meal? More importantly, how much of a pain would it be to try to create these metrics by hand? With Hot Lunch Online it's one click away.
What your users see
So what do the students and parents see? It is recommended that you provide the students and parents a link to the Hot Lunch Online site, from your own catering website. It will not only increase the number of hits to your own website, but you will also gain potential clients in the process! Parents will notice that you not only provide lunches for their kids, but that you also provide a range of other services that they could take advantage of.
Parents will link from your site to the Hot Lunch Online login page. We will put your own customized logo on the site as an added bonus, so the parents will not be confused when linked from your site.
From here, users can either register for the school year, login or reset a lost password.
One account, multiple users
Once logged in, a parent can create any number of users under their account. The users can be associated with any school or grade in the system.
Order for your users all at once!
When ordering, the parent can easily switch between the users, and compile a list of orders for each student all at once. It allows them to get in, and get out quickly and easily.
What are you waiting for?
Contact us, and start turning a profit with school food service!