K12 school cafeteria food sales: student accounts, preorders, and POS

[GNS]

Our current school ordering and POS system is going EOL.

We are looking for a solution that:

• allows parents to add funds to a student account (virtual gift card? house account?) and/or tie a credit card to an account, but have a preset limit over a specified time (eg $50/week or $400/month) to prevent nasty surprises - parents would be responsible for paying their child's bill, but the child is the one making the purchases so there need to be control in place
• allows a cashier to search for and apply food sales against a student account
• allows a cashier to be able to override an "insufficient funds" message and go into the red. Our present
• allows parents to preorder meals (on Monday, order a burrito for Wednesday, pizza for Thursday, and salad for Friday).

So I'm looking for three things:

1. Student accounts that parents can preload with funds or tie a credit card to for periodic billing (not for every daily transaction) with credit limits that ideally the parent can set (so the student can't buy food for all their friends and surprise the parent with a massive bill at the end of the month), with a fallback to parents asking the school to set a limit of $40/week or $500/month for example. POS cashier can search for the student's account and charge food purchases against the account. Parent can sign into their account and get a detailed list of all transactions. Account balance owing is periodically paid using stored credit card or add more funds to the account. Our present system allows the cashier to scan the student's ID card to search for their account.
2. Parents can preorder meals for younger students - either using student account or paying at the time with a credit card. Preorders for a particular day are ganged up and the kitchen delivers them to a group of volunteers at the school who distribute the food to the students based on the preorder report. I'm thinking a menu with availability tied to specific dates? "Wednesday Butter Chicken"? or maybe if you're ordering Monday the prep time is 48 hours...but that prep time would need to slide depending on the amount of time between ordering and availability.
3. Staff and older students can pay by debit or credit card for food purchases at the POS terminals (cashier processes the order).

So...online store with preorders, online account management, and POS terminals at the cafeteria for on-demand transactions.

Is this doable with a combination of Square offerings?

[JJ_]

Hello there @GNS

I love to hear you are considering Square as a solution to your Cafeteria Point of Sale. While several of these needs are not clear features of Square I can see that there are several options we provide that could meet your needs. 

I am going to recommend you reach out directly to our support team, so they can best guide you in real-time on identifying these solutions.  You can give us a call at 855-809-9000 between 6 am - 6 pm Pacific Time Monday-Friday.