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 😭

It worked well for us.
I never picked meals ahead of time, just added money and Dd would choose what to eat on the day cafeteria style. Worked great for paying for school trips, and I had a balance when she finish school and they were quick to pay it back to me.

We have that for one of ours. Not had the issues you mentioned but I do prefer Squid which my other son's school uses.

We’ve had it back no problem a number of times. It’s the school office that sort it.

Developers code for all browsers (that are recent enough to get security updates).

Also if you're using a browser it's not an app.

I find it annoying thst you can't transfer a balance between DC.
DD had about £12 on her school meal account for about 4 years....which I wanted to transfer to DS ....but had to get a refund and then add which I feel like is an added layer of faff.

I also hate operoo, does anyone else have that?

To be fair, on the first fullday back for all staff, we hate everything computer based.

It's annoying, and the website is poorly designed. I always want to pay with a credit card (I use it for everything, for the points) and I'm heartily sick of all the nagging to set up one click payments (which can only be from your bank account). Add to basket, go to basket, ignore great big "set up one click payments" button, click tiny "use another payment method" link, etc.

The interface for ordering meals on the mobile site is frustrating in that it always seems to open up showing a random date several weeks in the past, forcing me to scroll across to get to the next week. Why can't it just default to today's date? Or Monday, if I'm using it at the weekend?

That said, although it's poorly designed it does generally work pretty consistently for me. I've only had a problem once, when trying to use it at 9am on the first day of a new term. It's pretty solid otherwise.

CasperGutman it's interesting to hear that I'm not the only one being nagged constantly about single click payments but upon reading your post I was hoping to hear a trick for dismissing the aggressive setup noise (since we don't pay on it at all) i.e. Not having to say "no" every fucking time

Disappointed 😫

Just wondering as my DS is in the last year of primary will we have ParentPay in secondary? Also lunches in his school are provided by an external catering firm and we select from them, not ParentPay. I have never heard of lunches being booked thru PP.
Thanks