Many elementary schools celebrate family through special events, such as Grandparents Day. On this day, students are welcome to bring a grandparent to school, kind of like an ancestral show-and-tell event.

We, ourselves, don’t recall such a special day during our years in school. Even had there been the occasion, our youngest grandparent was 57 years older than us, so the likelihood of participation would have been low. Forty to fifty years have passed, and we wish we could have been part of Grandparents Day during those bygone days.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have brought your grandparent to school? Imagine the stories of cave living and dinosaurs they would have shared with one another! Now, think about all the meals your grandparent has provided you. Wouldn’t it have been awesome to have returned the kindness by buying a school lunch for grandma or grandpa?

Most POS systems provide some means of handling unusual meal situations. Probably the most common way of ringing a guest, for example, is as an anonymous cash sale. Of course, then the school either charges the guest for their meal or has to have a zero-dollar meal button. These workarounds give you the ability to count the extra meals and maybe even let you bill someone for any freebies, but workarounds are inefficient ways of getting around the shortcomings of a system, and they reveal software that isn’t designed to provide solutions to real-world situations.

Meal Magic Insight‘s sales registers don’t use workarounds for guests. Guests, instead, are handled smoothly through built-in support for this need. Unlike other systems, our sales registers are not glorified cash registers tweaked to get by in a school. Instead, ours have been engineered from the ground-up to accommodate the unique demands of school cafeterias.

Our employees have access to twenty-plus years of support call logs. We review these logs regularly because they are a valuable source of information regarding how our software works and how we can make it better. These logs expose how schools operate beyond our thinking and tell us the types of solutions schools need, such as guest sales. Guest sales are one example of solving a problem, not through convoluted workarounds, but through carefully crafted design.

We can’t emphasize enough how Meal Magic Insight is unlike any school food service software that has come before it. It’s about simplicity, accountability, and flexibility. It’s about providing innovative solutions for your needs, and most importantly, it’s about you.

To Claude and Lena and George and Isabel—our grandparents.