...to expect Scholarest to record it when I pay them by cheque? They are unbelievably.............

[Aero]

........crap!!! Yesterday I received the third brown envelope since Easter with a note saying I owe them money!! To date they have asked me for £25.60 which I have already paid them!! That is a lot of money.

The whole reason I started paying by cheque was because when I paid in cash I kept getting these notes home saying I owe them £££ when I know full well I've paid the correct amount at the correct time. I even started to go in personally on a Monday morning and pay it myself rather than putting it in dd's bag, so I would know that there was no chance of the money going missing before she handed it in. I thought that writing a weekly cheque should put an end to any discrepencies. At least with a cheque I have a record of when, and how much I've paid and I can prove it to them. It's a total PITA though, having to trawl through my bank a/c every time they cock up! They are making me doubt myself and it's getting right up my nose.

Anyone else get this sort of problem with Scholarest?

I work in a school office & we don't have anything to do with the lunch money any more. The kitchen staff are employed directly by the company & collect the money every morning & give out vouchers, or you can buy the vouchers weekly/monthly/termly
Do Scholarest give vouchers out to the children & is DD losing them, so they then charge her for a meal? Mind you £25.60 is a lot of meals for this to be the answer...

I make the cheque out to Scholarest, but I pay it at the school office. The receptionist records it (or at least I think she does), and I expect they get passed on to Scholarest. No dinner ticket/voucher or any other form of receipt is given (hence I use the cheques for my own records). The cheques are being cashed. They are saying I owe £6.40 for the week before half term. My bank statement shows I have paid every week in May bar half term itself. Four payments went out to Scholarest in May. As far as they are concerned, if someone hasn't bothered their arse to record it, then it hasn't been paid!!

Well, we used to do it, but I think the bursar got fed up with having to pay for the meals when children forgot their dinner money & the parents never paid -it started to mount up. Now the company has to chase them up.
The only thing we have to do is the admin for free school meals & recording whether latecomers are having school dinner or not, so they can be added to the totals.

Photocopy your statements & highlight the payments & sent it to them.

I have had to do this concerning something else just today!! Not nice I know, showing everyone your cheques for £100's to Ann Summers But if it has to be done to prove it, I would do it

Your statements may not be enough because presumably they will not show who the payee was.

You can get the paid cheques back from the bank if necessary, which will show who they were paid to and where they were banked.

Can you pay by direct transfer so your statements will show it?

Well, Scholarest are the only people I pay a weekly cheque of £8 to and on the two weeks I paid £6.40, dd only had four school dinners. I would normally also be able to show the cheque stubs, but I'm into a new cheque book now and once I've checked the payments against my statement, the stubs get binned! I have printed off my statement for them although I agree, it's entirely none of their business to view the state of our finances.

It's just a hassle I could do well without and I wonder how much extra cash they make from parents who are then doubting themselves despite being sure they paid. Or are they just trying to balance the book because some people haven't paid.

I went into the office this morning and the procedure was explained. The office simply puts the cheques etc in an envelope and Scholarest collect the envelope three times a week. The secretary is going to investigate as there is no way it could have got lost (it was banked anyway!), and I've made the point that a receipt should be issued at the time of payment. That way, providing you keep your receipts, there should be no doubt you've paid when you say you have!

Do you always write your child's name, school and class and the week reference on the back of the cheque? These companies just bank all the cheques en masse, and may not record them correctly if all the information isn't on the back.

They just ask for the child's name and class on the back of the cheque (date being on the front, not that they ever look at it, obviously).