eTrition Ideas Portal
We're looking for a hands-free integration between the Preorder module and transactions in the POS. Currently there's not a way to turn preorders into transactions and charge student/staff accounts automatically for their preorders. For this to work, there needs to be some sort of bridge between Preorder and POS, or an ability to generate a plain text report of daily preorders from the Preorder (ideally, auto-generated and auto-dropped to SFTP or be available on-demand through interface and a Restful API) and then upload that report into POS as transactions so that POS would charge accounts accordingly and complete the purchase. Or, again, an SFTP or API method to do the same thing.
The reasons for the request are simple: saving time, reducing errors, and optimizing resources. While manually processing and tracking preorders from ~10 people may be manageable, it quickly turns into a chaos when there are 300+ students using the Preorder module - or thousands if/when this method of food ordering becomes more popular. In cases, when the facility issuing preordered meals has not access to POS and no training (or simply not given access due to policies), it would require a lengthy chain of interactions between people running Preorder reports, figuring out who got the meal, then pulling each student up in POS and processing transactions there. Again, time wasted and increased possibility of errors.
