Showing Student Lunch Account Numbers to Parents in Student Profiles

Jennifer Miller
Jennifer Miller
Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary
in Blackbaud Student Information System™

Our school lunches are provided through an outside service with their own system. Parents need to know their students' account numbers to log into the lunch service portal.

Is there a way to create a field for each student where we can enter those lunch account numbers AND it would be visible to parents?

We tried a custom field, but it ended up replacing emergency contact numbers on the forms they completed, and is not showing up for all students.

Comments

  • Scott Chrysler
    Scott Chrysler
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 K-12 Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge Name Dropper

    @Jennifer Miller - We use one of our 10 custom fields to handle this. It is text input field on the Contact Card under General Information. The custom field is titled “Student Lunch Pin”. The field is only visible to students as we could not find a way to limit the parent view to only the parent of that student.

    Hope that helps.

    Scott

  • Jennifer Miller
    Jennifer Miller
    Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant First Anniversary

    @Scott Chrysler

    HI, Scott. We tried this and it was pulling emergency contact phone numbers from a form and if we changed it, it changed the form, as well. Maybe it was a bug or something? Our other issue was the field wasn't available for every student. I have no idea why.

  • Scott Chrysler
    Scott Chrysler
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 K-12 Fall 2025 Product Update Briefing Badge Name Dropper

    @Jennifer Miller - I saw that in your initial post. I cannot explain that behavior. Our method has worked for us with no hitches since we migrated to K12. If you have not already used all 10 of your custom fields, I would suggest you try creating a new Custom Field (Core > Settings > General settings > Publishable fields) and see if that will work. It may also require a call to support to determine why your field was behaving in this manner.

    Good luck.

    Scott

  • Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Geoffrey Goodfellow
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    Hi, @Jennifer Miller. We had a similar issue with our school lunch software. I ended up taking a reverse approach and forcing the school lunch software to use an account number that matched the Student ID from Blackbaud. Part of the process of importing the students into the school lunch software is to create a .csv file of the various student names, grade levels, and I was able to include the Student ID in that import as the school lunch account number. Because Student ID is a field that students and parents can see in Blackbaud, that gave them what they needed to login to our school lunch software. Not sure if your lunch vendor has that option or not but thought I would mention it.

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