At My Food Program, our mission is to make participation in the CACFP and SFSP as easy as possible. We are always trying to make our software better by improving on the functions we have and adding new ones based on customer feedback. Check out our list of software updates and new features below.
Update 18.10.1
Helpful Calendar Icons for the New Meal Pattern.
We’ve added icons to the menu calendar to make it easier and quicker for you to monitor compliance with the new meal pattern.
- The “whole grain” icon is grey if you don’t have a whole grain-rich food on your menu and it turns green once you do.
- A “juice” icon appears on any day in which you serve juice. Our menu planning system doesn’t allow you to add juice to a menu twice in one day.
- A “meat/meat alternate” icon appears if you substitute meat/meat alternate for grain at breakfast. Our menu planning system doesn’t allow you to do this more than three times in one week.
New Report: Daily Meal Count with Attendance
Officially this report is titled “Daily Meal Count with Attendance”, but around the office we’ve started calling it “The Whole Enchilada” report. This report pulls an incredible amount of information into one place and is especially helpful to show to state agencies during reviews. This report includes a list of all active participants with their age and ID along with their attendance and meal counts by day (similar to our current Meal Count by Name and Five Day Meal Count Report). It can be run for any 5-day period with any combination of rosters.
On the final page is a full reconciliation by day. We start with the “Payable” meals that made it to the claim and then also list the number of meals:
- Disallowed
- Over the claim limit
- Recorded for non-CACFP participants (such as staff or participants who bring their own meals)
- Raw total meal count
New Report: Grocery List
We added a report that helps you do your food shopping. It adds up how much you will need of the items on your menu based on participant schedules and produces a shopping list separated by food group. Below is a sample of the report.
We also made additional small improvements based on customer requests:
- Added parent/guardian name to the Missing Forms Report
- Made it easier to merge participants
- Prevented the creation of Food Production Records if all quantities were zero
- Created a new report to track monitoring visits
Update 18.09.1
On Monday, October 1st the transition period to the new meal pattern ends.
You will notice that the button in Site Details that says “Ignore Whole Grains” is now gone. Sponsors now have the choice of either full menu validation for the new meal pattern or no validation of menus. This checkbox is in Site Details and named “Ignore menu validation”.
We’ve added some other exciting features with the 2.0.0 release*!
- Sponsors and sites can now delete a menu, including an infant menu. Look for the red “Delete Menu” button on the menu planning page. Keep in mind that deleting a menu will also delete the associated food production record.
- Sponsors can now delete an income form. A blue hyperlink called “Delete income form” now appears on the far right of any income form that is eligible for deletion. If an income form was included in a claim, it cannot be deleted.
- Participants are automatically numbered using the External Site ID box. Every time you create a new participant from now on, they will automatically be assigned an ID. Contact us if you would like us to populate IDs for your existing participants.
- One of our most-requested features – the ability to prevent staff from adding participants using the mobile app! This has been a common way for duplicate participants to be created. If you’d like to restrict staff from adding participants using the mobile app, uncheck the box in Site Details that says “Allow staff to add participants using the mobile app”.
- We’ve separated the dashboard icons for income and enrollment forms. If you set enrollment forms to “Ignore” in Site Details, the enrollment form dashboard box will turn grey so that sites know that enrollment forms are not necessary.
Update 18.08.1
Download an income and enrollment form with participant and parent/guardian information pre-filled!
We’ve designed a single form that collects all the enrollment information required by USDA (participant’s normal days and hours in care as well as the meals normally received) along with the income information needed to place a household in an income category. Before using this form, we strongly recommend that you send it to your state agency for approval. Our form has already been reviewed by several state agencies. Please contact us if you need assistance sharing information with your state agency. Click here for instructions on how to generate these forms.
Sponsors can disallow meals recorded by a site.
Meals can be marked for disallow for a variety of reasons, including:
- Meal counts not current
- Meal counts not taken at point of service
- Meal served is not creditable
- Parent-provided meal
- Special dietary need not correctly accomodated
- All components not served at the same time
- Participant not eligible for CACFP
These meals will be excluded from the claim and will appear on the disallowed meals report as “Disallowed by Sponsor”. Click here for instructions on how to disallow meals. At this time, the disallow feature is only for sites using meal count by name (roster-based) meal count entry. We will be creating this feature for headcount meal count sites in the near future.
Ability to accommodate more complicated licensed capacity arrangements.
In some states, there are additional restrictions on licensed capacity that go beyond a simple count. For these situations, sponsors can add additional restrictions, such as “not to exceed 12 infants and toddlers combined” to their licensing age range configurations. Click here for instructions on how to set these additional limits.
Report Enhancements.
We’ve added the following new reports:
- Lapsed Participant Report: a list of participants who have not been checked in for attendance or meal count for at least 90 days. This will help sponsors and sites keep track of participants that should be set to “inactive”.
- Duplicate Case Number Report: this report searches all the households in a site and lists those with duplicate case numbers. This is helpful if a sponsor is trying to identify duplicate households.
- Sponsored Site Claim Summary Report: if you sponsor unaffiliated sites, then this report is for you! It is a simple summary of the number of meals/snacks included in a claim along with the amount that the site will receive (i.e. the full cash-in-lieu plus 85% of meal reimbursement).
- Sponsor-Level Claim Summary for Sponsors of Unaffiliated Centers: this report is also for sponsors of unaffiliated sites. It breaks down the reimbursement by the amount going to the sponsor and the amount going to the site. This can assist with bookkeeping and claim entry.
We’ve added the following new features to existing reports:
- Disallowed Meals Report: you now have the option of running the report to include or exclude meals that were not payable because they exceeded the daily claim limit.
- Meal Count by Name Report: for Texas sponsors, we added a paragraph to certify the accuracy of the counts.
- Expense by IRS Category Report: added additional expense categories and added a description column. This makes the report more useful for documenting nonprofit meal service.
Update 18.07.1
The USDA recently released a memo CACFP10-2018 which specified that sponsors using electronic systems can forgo the five-day reconciliation! However, meal counts cannot be used to generate attendance records for the purposes of the 5-day reconciliation. This is currently our default setting (since a participant must be in attendance in order to eat a meal), and regardless of how the site is configured:
- attendance records can always be manipulated separately from meal counts
- and
- participants can be checked in for attendance but not for meals.
In order to accommodate sponsors that wish to require attendance to be taken before entering meal counts, we are introducing a new feature!
After the upgrade has taken place*, you will see a new checkbox in “Site Details” called “Attendance Records kept outside of My Food Program”. After the upgrade, all of your sites will have this box checked by default. If the box is:
- CHECKED then attendance and meal counts work as they do today.
- UNCHECKED then the site must take attendance before entering meal counts.
If the box is UNCHECKED, the really exciting part is that only participants that are checked in for attendance will appear on the meal count list! For those sponsors that struggle with sites checking in the wrong participants for meals or have lengthy rosters, this could be a great option. However, be sure to train your sites carefully as they may be tempted to create a duplicate participant if they forget to mark a participant in for attendance and therefore don’t see them on the meal count list.
Update 18.06.1
We have more multi-site sponsors than ever using My Food Program. To meet the needs of our customers, we have created a new report that aggregates the claim information for all sites in one PDF document (shown below). You will find this report on your Sponsor Dashboard under “Reports”.
Simply select the claiming method used in your state (blend rate or actual meal count by type), select the month/year* and click “View Claims”. If you are going to print the report, we recommend you click “Download PDF” instead of trying to print directly from the web browser.
*The reports will only populate correctly for claims created after this feature was implemented. Disregard any reports for prior months.
Update 18.04.1
We’re releasing a new version of My Food Program that now includes the Summer Food Service Program! Sponsors of child care centers, family day care homes, emergency shelters and adult daycare facilities should not notice any changes. Sponsors of afterschool programs will notice that you now have the ability to track food temperatures.
Update 18.03.1
On the Web Application
We’ve updated the functionality for participants that are assigned to more than one roster. If a participant is already checked in for a meal on a different roster, their meal count box will be grayed out and there will be a note about the roster on which they were already checked in.
*Note that My Food Program has never allowed a participant to be checked in for the same meal twice. This new feature provides the information up-front. Prior to this update, if you tried to check a participant in twice for the same meal, an error message would appear and the duplicate count would need to be adjusted prior to saving the meal count. This new feature will prevent that problem from occurring in the first place!
On the Mobile Meal Count Application
We have added a new feature that allows the user to configure the length of the “auto-submit” time window. With some sites having large rosters, 20 seconds wasn’t enough time to scroll through all the names! To set this option, log into the mobile application and click on “info” in the upper-right corner. Use the slider to set the desired auto-submit time. The default auto-submit time is 20 seconds. The maximum auto-submit time is 180 seconds.
Update 18.01.2
Sponsors can now hide the “Submit to Sponsor” button until a calendar month is complete.
Sites are now required to resolve the error triggered when meal counts are greater than attendance before proceeding with the claim.
If they attempt to click “Submit to Sponsor” with this error in place, My Food Program will generate a reminder that this particular error must be fixed before proceeding.
