Roaming

The Roaming feature in Fusion allows users to “Roam” between connected schools/campuses and use a single cashless catering account to purchase items using the system.

Enabling and configuring roaming

!The enabling and configuration of roaming can only be performed by authenticated members of CRB Cunninghams staff. If you wish to have roaming enabled on your system, please contact info@crbcunninghams.co.uk or your account manager.

Once enabled, CRB Cunninghams will configure roaming as instructed. This includes specifying which schools can roam where. For example, users from School A can roam to School B, but School B’s users may not be able to roam to School A. We will also need to know which users’ data we should be downloading to the tills for use with manual lookup and offline mode.

Restrictions to enabling roaming

When roaming is enabled between schools, we now need to ensure that any PINs and card numbers are unique across those schools. For example, before roaming is enabled, both School A and School B could issue a PIN of 1234 to a user. When roaming is then enabled between these schools, the system will no longer allow this as it would not know which account to open when that PIN is entered. Therefore, when enabling roaming, should two users have the same PIN or card number, these will need to be re-issued before we are able to proceed.

Any newly generated PINs are forced to be a minimum of 6 digits in length to avoid potential conflicts in the future and to increase account security.

Using accounts while roaming

Once roaming has been enabled and configured, the users will be able to open their account and use the system in the exact same way that they do now, providing that they are visiting a school that their enrolled school has been configured to visit. If a user attempts to open their account at a school that their enrolled school has not been configured to visit, the user’s account will not be opened. There is no need to specify or approve which individual users can roam, the system assumes that if the user is physically located at that school and attempting to use the system to, then they are able to roam.

*Users can utilise pre-order kiosks and revaluation units at the schools that they are visiting if they wish, not just the Point of Sale.

Manual lookup at the Point of Sale

In scenarios where the user does not have a valid identification method available (for example, they have lost their card or the user normally uses fingerprint recognition at their enrolled school but the school they are visiting does not use fingerprint recognition), then they can be found manually by the operator at the Point of Sale.

!In order for roaming users to be found manually at the Point of Sale, the PoS must have downloaded the user’s account information. The PoS will only download the data of the users specified when configuring roaming between schools.

In order to keep the normal lookup of users performant and easy to use for the operators when attempting to find non-roaming users, roaming users are not present when using the usual method (using the tiles on the left-hand side of the screen). Instead, you will need to use the search function from the bottom-right of the find user screen.

This will present an on-screen keyboard and the operator can use this to type in the user’s name. This will search across all users that are either enrolled at this school and those roaming users whose details have been allowed to be downloaded to this till as part of the roaming configuration. Entering more text will filter out the results further. When the required user is in view, simply press on them and the account will be opened.

*Roaming users will be displayed with a light yellow background and a small roaming icon in the top-left, whereas users enrolled at this school will be displayed with no background/icon.

Reporting

While the use of roaming is straightforward for the users, it does provide complexity to caterers as now monies need to be reconciled between sites. For example, a user who is enrolled at School A puts £20 onto their account using School A’s online payments provider. This money is therefore now sitting in School A’s (or their caterers) bank account. If this user now visits School B and spends £3, School B is now owed that money from School A. However, at the same time, users from School B can be doing the same at School A. This can get further complex when multiple schools can roam to each other. To assist in allowing schools to reconcile the financials between themselves, we have made some changes to the ‘Daily summary (Classic)’ report and have added a couple of new reports, ‘Roaming reconciliation (Summary)’ and ‘Roaming reconciliation (Detailed)’.

Daily summary (Classic)

The Daily summary report is the report that most, if not all, schools will run at the end of each day and is used to provide an overview of their day’s trading. This report, therefore, needed to be updated to include roaming transactions. While the Daily summary is covered in detail here, the below provides an overview pertaining to roaming.

*Incoming vs outgoing: Across our roaming reports, you will see users/transactions referred to as Incoming/In or Outgoing/Out. Incoming is where users not enrolled at this school have come in and made transactions, whereas Outgoing is users enrolled at this school going to other schools and making transactions.

Transaction and balance reconciliation section

This section provides an overview as to how the balances of users that attend this school have changed through the reporting period, therefore needs to include sales where users have made top-ups and sales at other schools. To allow clients to balance the ‘Available for banking’ figure against the physical cash they have, two new figures have been added to show ‘Incoming roamer topups’ and ‘Outgoing roamer topups’.

Sales adjustments section

This section of the daily summary report provides details as to why the sales figures listed in the ‘Transactions and balance reconciliation’ section may not match those in the ‘Sales breakdown’ grid at the bottom of the report. In the scenario where there have been roaming sales transactions within this date range, these will be displayed in the ‘Roaming sales’ figure. A positive figure means that the value of incoming roaming sales is greater than the total value of outgoing roamer sales whereas a negative figure means the opposite. The ‘Adjusted sales’ total at the bottom of this section will provide the total sales figure for this school and will match the values present in the ‘Sales breakdown’ grid below.

Sales breakdown section

This section of the report, shows all sales (including pre-orders and vending sales) that are for this school, therefore, outgoing roamer sales are not present but roamers coming into this school are shown as ‘Roamers (In)’. You may notice, that for these sales, there are no allowance sales figures. As you don’t need to claim for these allowances, you will just need to claim the cash equivalent from the user’s school, therefore Fusion will classify these within the ‘Cash and cashless sales’ section.

Roaming reconciliation (Summary)

This report provides details as to how money needs to be reconciled between schools. A positive total value means that you are owed this money from this school, whereas a negative value meals that you owe this value to that school.

Roaming reconciliation (Detailed)

Grouped by school, this report provides details of each transaction between the selected date range made by users while they were roaming into or out of this school.

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