To wonder why schools use ParentPay when it's so fucking awful for parents?

[DoughnutPrincess]

Yet another weekend attempt to book school lunches for the week ahead, yet more random timeout crap & having to load up a desktop because their website doesn't work properly on multiple iOS or Android devices we have in the house. I'm seriously at the end of my tether every fucking week of having to use their poorly designed, poorly implemented "product".

Does the system work better for teachers or something? I could understand why it's being bought if it's a better system for teachers/school staff, but surely I'm not the only parent who uses it and finds it an unintuitive, terribly designed and run piece of crap? Who is paying them ££ to inflict this on parents?

I've been using it for the 3rd year so far and we have years of having to use it for school lunches ahead 😭

I use it as a parent and teacher and don’t have too many issues with it. It could be a bit more intuitive on the parent end and it occasionally goes down at 9am which is a pain when inputting dinner preferences.

Have you got the app?

We’ve been using it for 7 years and I don’t recognise any of what you’re saying.

Is it how your school have got it set up maybe?

Yes, it is bloody awful!

Honestly? It's a million times less user friendly as an admin. I hated it.

Unfortunately the notice period they had us tied into we were stuck with it for years longer than we wanted to be (and they continued to invoice us long after we had got rid of it).

Mine had parent pay at secondary school and Wise Pay at sixth form and that is so, so so much worse.

Never had any problems. Liked that it was one interface for both DDs schools so I could do both at the same time.

Download Edge or Chrome on your phone. Like most apps it only works on browsers the developers use.

I've had no issues with parent pay, or school gateway. Weduc however.... 😡🤯

Use it on my Samsung but never had any issues.

Nobody's particularly keen on it on the other side, either. However, the alternatives aren't any better, for all the fancy user interfaces that they try to impress people with and charge through the nose for.

Agree!!!!

I've used it for about 10 years and never had any issues.

Never had a problem with it

I'm using Chrome btw, tried on both mobile and desktop.

It still insists on interrupting every login to get us to set up 1 click payments despite Scottish school kids getting free meals across the age group

And it won't let me order all the main choices before puddings, it somehow restricts parents to choosing a main AND a pudding even if a pudding isn't wanted that day (we select fruit on days where DC isn't very hungry then hopefully they'll eat it or someone else could have it, but it seems such an avoidable waste some days when we'd like to opt out)

No app for parents afaik but I'd love to know if I'm wrong? We could use iOS or Android. But knowing parentpay it would just go down with website outages still which is the main bugbear 😫

Never had a problem on iPhone for the last 3 years although I possibly use the web site rather than an app.

Parentpay fine for me.

Arbor is an absolute nightmare

I've been using it for 4 years for both children without any issues.

The product itself is certainly not jazzy but does what it says on the tin.

I wonder why you have such a different experience 🤔 It sounds painfully frustrating.

I never had a problem with ParentPay on either website or iOS app.

To the people who say it works fine, how do you choose lunches,pay etc?

We do ours every weekend for the week ahead

Often Saturday daytime, occasionally Sunday afternoon

Do you do it weekdays? The whole term at a time?

It's often showing a random website timeout. And has anyone figured out how to say e.g. on Weds no pudding needed (to avoid the waste from it being a mandatory selection)

@DoughnutPrincess its not just parentpay i have an issue with!! different schools use different ways of accessing material/ microsoft teams, firefly, and another few/ then there are texts! I have absolutely no idea how to access my sons homework! I have made up and forgotten so many bloody passwords that I have given up and have no idea what is going on in either of their schools!! why not just email and an account to pay the money over to for either school?

I haven’t had any issues, but then again I just set it up to auto top up and my DD is 16 so I don’t need to check what she’s eaten / not eaten. So I don’t use it much apart from paying for extra items

Its been a while since I've had to chose lunches, but yes, on Saturday evening I would sit down with DD, and go through and chose her food each day at a time. Seemed a perfectly logical way to do it rather than going back to the beginning to chose pudding.

Parent pay is more than just Lunches so that's why you get the One Click reminder... (Although school asked us not to use it as it takes longer for money to come through).

No problem here.
Kids pick their own lunches in the morning from a small selection of about five options and they are all the same cost.

Is it possible to set a minimum daily spend on this platform? Our school gives them a card that takes from a pre paid balance.

I assumed it was used because it was relatively cheap, because there's no way they could have chosen it based on how good it is to use.