Setting Up a Lunch Order Form

Setting Up a Lunch Order Form

Many schools have the need to have an online ordering system that allows parents to prepay for their child's lunch, giving them the option to choose the variety and amount and choose to pay for the entire semester or just specific days.

There are two factors to consider when setting up your form:
  1. Make it as easy as possible for parents to order.
  2. Assure that you get the reports that you need.
Here is an example of a form that would allow parents to purchase pizza for their students each Friday with 3 varieties of pizza at 5 different price points based upon quantity.

On the form:
  1. Parents should be able to order throughout the semester.
  2. The varieties of pizza are: Cheese, Hawaiian, and Pepperoni.
  3. Cost is $3/1 slice, $5/2 slices, $7/3 slices, $14/whole pizza, $12/teacher pizza. 
  4. Reports should verify what has been purchased for each child, by grade, each week, as well as totals of what needs to be ordered. Additionally, it would be helpful to be able to run a cost analysis on a monthly basis.
To create the form:
  1. Have one pizza order form for each month by creating one lunch template form that is duplicated each month. This allows you to leave open orders for the current month and close the forms for prior months. It also allows you to create less SKUs.
  2. You can also choose to have all forms active at the beginning of the order period.
  3. Forms are set to One Per Student, One Time Only. So once parents place their order for that month, the form will not be presented to them again.
  4. Create SKUs for 1st Friday, 2nd Friday, 3rd Friday, etc.

  1. SKUs can be the price point with options as the kind of pizza. The concern with doing it this way is that the reports are going to be a little more difficult for you to calculate how many cheese pizzas you have because the orders for cheese slices are options on 5-6 different SKUs.
  2. The other option (recommended) is to create a SKU for each variety/price. This will give you more flexibility in how to run the reports.

  1. SKU name:  PZ-cheese-1-1  (PZ-cheese-1-1 = Pizza orders - cheese pizza - 1 slice - 1st day of the month.) The SKU name is important because the reports pull data based on the SKU.
  1. Don't add any special notes to the SKU. This will keep the form shorter in length.
  1. Add the SKUs to the form and add section titles that include the date of that pizza order. (Section title = Friday, January 5) The section titles make it easy for parents to see what dates they are ordering for.
On your template you will have all SKUs. When you duplicate the template, you will hide the SKUs that are not applicable. So if you don't have a 5th Friday, you would hide all of the SKUs associated with the orders for the 5th Friday.

This setup is a bit lengthy and it will take you quite a bit of time to create all of the SKUs. But, this is going to make it easiest for you to manage the sales and reports in the long run. Quite often, the reports are the most important. You want to quickly be able to run the report for ordering and delivery.


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