Hello! Dolibarr has been very helpful keeping our food pantry organized and running. Our food pantry is a non-profit organization that receives food from government programs and local businesses that donate food. In the past, we used to use spreadsheets and written paperwork to track all our needs, but as we grew we needed more robust solutions. Recently we have had a significant increase in the number of guests we serve and have needed to find ways to become more efficient so we could serve everyone. Dolibarr is what enabled us to do that. This program is able to keep track of our inventory, store guest information, track statistics for reports, and work as a point of sale to take orders. As a food pantry, we do not sell anything so dolibarr’s features sometimes take creative uses to fit, but we found a workflow that has been successful for us so far.
We use Dolibarr’s Third-party module, products modules, and TakePOS module to achieve our goals. Third-party stores each guest with their information and assigns them a barcode. Products has our various food items we have to track and we have created products for information that we want our volunteers to see in takepos to help them fill orders, and takepos allows us to take an order outside on a tablet and the volunteers inside the pantry can see the order and fill it out immediately.
In more detail:
Third-party
Because third-party assigns a customer code (which we use to create a barcode with), we have been able to make every guest a ‘library card’ with their name and barcode on it. So when they come to pick up food, we can scan their card and it pulls up their information in third-party. In addition to the general information, we have added fields for income, date-of-last-visit, proxy (if needed). We need each of these to comply with the programs. They can only come once every 30 days to receive food so when we scan them in we can see the date-of-last-visit and confirm it has been more than 30 days since they came. Then we can edit that to be today’s date. This allows us to check in the guest and keep track of visits for regulations.
Products
We store all of our food that needs to be tracked in the products module. We also have products created that help us fill orders and track statistics. These products are: family size (family of 1, family of 2, family of 3, etc), family makeup (1 child, 2 children, 3 adults, 1 senior, etc), allergies (peanut butter, strawberries, gluten, etc). These are made for use in takepos, explained in the next section. We use categories to group these in takepos to make that workflow simpler. At the end of a day, we can use these items to see how many families, children, adults, and seniors we served that day. Useful for reports.
TakePOS
We use takepos on used ipads so we can walk out to the guests in their car and take their order there. The volunteer will scan their ‘library card’ again and this will enter that guest into the order. We have categories for the questions the volunteer needs to ask ( 1. family size and income, 2. Family breakdown, 3. allergies) so they have only the ‘items’ related to that question there. They will click each category, ask the question and press the correct item based on the answer, then click on the next category to do the next. The final item to add is ‘cart’ which lets everyone know that order is ready to fill. Inside the pantry, volunteers have ipads and can see the order and can fill it without the outside volunteer walking the order back. This has been the biggest improvement to workflow as it saved us a lot of downtime. Finally, when the order is finished we can weigh the cart and use quantity to the ‘cart’ item to track food weight given. We then use “Direct payment (cash)” to finish the order. Every item is $0.00 and that was the quickest way we say to complete an order without needing a payment system.
However, there is some room for improvements and I would love feedback on possible ways to achieve them. If not easy ways exist, I’d like to pay a developer to add the features.
As noted above, we scan guests’ barcodes with both third-party and takepos modules. I’d love it if scanning them into takepos could mark them as having visited today as well. Even better would be if it could check the last time they visited and if it was <30 days ago show a popup saying they are X days too early and if they are okay it would change the date to today. That would allow our volunteers to only need to look at takepos while taking orders outside and only have to scan the card once.
The second improvement would be to somehow retrieve their order information from their last visit when they are scanned in so we do not have to ask the same questions each time. The guests have questioned why we ask how many people are in their family or their allergies every time as it is always the same. So it would be great if takepos scan their card, and when it finds their name also add the other items- family size, breakdown, allergies- and the volunteer just needs to ask if they are still the same. I don’t know if it would do this by simply finding their last takepos order and pulling the information from that, or if I made custom fields in third-party and had that information stored there and takepos could find their name through the barcode and fill any products that match the info in the custom fields (eg: family size 1, peanut butter allergy, etc).
If we could manage those changes, the volunteers would be thrilled. Most of them are elderly and while they can fumble around with the tablet, the easier I can make it the less errors we make, the smoother our operation runs, and the more people we can give food in the same amount of time.
