PantrySOFT™ Features

Track received inventory, outgoing inventory, or both. Track generic items like food poundage or specific items like Can of Tuna.

Create an item scheme and workflow that perfectly matches your reports. Gather exactly what’s needed for reporting to major sources like the USDA, grant applications, and other internal or external institutional requirements.

Customize Item Types, Item Sources, and Visit Types to differentiate inventory activity by institutional source.

Optionally set up multiple locations, and transfer goods between them.

Scan specific UPC codes to “teach” PantrySOFT™ which specific UPCs belong to the custom items you’ve created. Available for customer check-out and back-end receiving.

Toggle your employees’ specific access to inventory controls.

Customers can directly reserve your inventory for pickup later.

Meets The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) requirements.

Track Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP).

Craft custom questions to filter the visitor counts in your reports. Attach them to the three primary intake screens. See the answers on custom reports.

Offer a simplified intake screen so customers can check themselves in. “Express Kiosk” interface begins with just a simple search bar, and guides the user through key intake screens.

From their browser at home, customers can register and re-register themselves, schedule a pickup appointment, shop for goods, or any combination of these.

Send your clients appointment reminders via SMS and email.

Attach notes and alerts to a client record so other employees will see them when they load the client record.

Set up re-registration reminders on any recurring basis you want.

Record visit information including outgoing inventory, custom visit types, and custom questions pertaining to each visit.

Record client signatures beneath custom agreement text. Toggle this feature for Registrations and/or Visits.

Assign clients their own account numbers and use barcodes to find them with a quick scan. Attach a scanner or use a device camera.

Core fields on the household member page are automatically tallied for you in our “Aggregate Reports.”

See visitor counts broken down by city, gender, and age derived from the date of birth.

See custom questions you attach to primary intake screens manifest as custom visitor counts in our “Aggregate Reports.”

Create an “Is Veteran?” custom question and quickly see how many veterans visited your pantry.

Quickly see core specifics of all households that visited in a given date range. Navigate to their records with a single click.

See one detail-line for each household that visited in a given date range.

Pull up accounts of moving inventory. A suite of Inventory Reports is organized by Source, Location, Visit-Program, Item Type, Client, and more.

Pull up a Distribution by Client Inventory Report for a certain range and see what items and quantities each client received for that period.

See a list of custom reports we’ve created for clients with an overall setup or else with reporting needs similar to your own.

Find and use a custom Non-Visiting Clients report we created by customer request to help them audit their inactive clients.

Craft custom questions you need answered on every visit, and use them as a filter for head-count reports, client roster reports, etc.

Add items to a visit, tracking them later through distribution reports. Items can be as broad as, “meal” or as specific as, “canned tuna.”

Tag visits with a “visit type” to reflect different distribution programs.

Create a “Holiday Giveaway” visit type and later pull up a “Holiday Giveaway” inventory report.

Set up multiple locations for the pantry and register a visit to a specific location.

Record client signatures beneath custom agreement text on the Visit screen.

Assign visits to a specific delivery route. Special driver interface shows the deliveries on their route along with access to maps and directions.

Make visit “recipes” (templates) assigned to a specific client that describes their usual order. Then tell PantrySOFT™ when to create these recurring visits. (Especially useful for delivery pantries like meals on wheels operations. )

Set up delivery of 7 meal packages to Mr. Jones on Tuesdays, and watch PantrySOFT™ create these Tuesday visits every week, automatically.

Create template weeks with availability blocks, each with its own number of schedule slots. PantrySOFT™ will limit new appointments to available slots each week.

You can serve 30 clients Fridays between noon and 3, so you create three-hour-long Friday availability blocks in that three-hour span, with 10 slots apiece.

Assign a schedule template to each of your locations to reflect varying staff or resource availability by visit-site.

Set up two different availability schemes, one for your main location and a second for your Friday Central Park giveaways.

Assign a template to each of your programs (“Visit Types”) within each of your locations to reflect varying staff or resource availability by the program at your respective sites.

Set up two different availability schemes for your main location: one for Monday and Friday morning “Regular Visits” and one for Friday “Diaper giveaways”.

When not using the online store, optionally switch to free-form scheduling on the standard dashboard.

Your intake employees need a free hand to make each week’s schedule, so you let them make appointments whenever they will instead of hard-coding availability into PantrySOFT™.

Optionally set Registration records to expire at a custom interval, prompting registration-delinquent clients to enter a new one after the prior one expires.

By default, when a client visits 11 months after his prior registration, the system prompts the user to remind the client they’ll need to re-register the following month. The length of the registration expiration and the warning can both be changed.

Create custom Registration Questions to gauge client eligibility, or else to answer questions that pertain to the entire household. Incorporate registration data into Visitor Tallies on reports.

Optionally activate a widget that helps calculate income and expenses for the household, recording expenses and income sources by person.

Record client signatures beneath custom agreement text on the Registration screen.

Optionally activate the Consultation widget and it will appear on the main dashboard below Visits. Pop it open to quickly send clients an SMS or email inviting or reminding them to seek out specific referral-contacts you’ve already set up in the system.

Enter the contact info for community services outside your pantry that might be useful to your clients. Add custom invitation messages introducing the service.

Set up a referral for the local Women’s Shelter and include an introduction to the contact person there to be included in email/ text message referrals.

Group referrals by any logic you like, so you can send multiple referrals to a client with one click.

Set up a “Homeless” Referral Group and attach referrals to a nearby shelter and a local thrift store that provides clothing.

Edit a referral you attached to a Client record upon the client’s return, and record a status. Gather status counts in reports to track the success of your referrals.

Set up a Status List including “Sent”, “Contacted”, and “Assistance Granted”. Pull up a report that shows how many referrals to the local shelter have the “Assistance Granted” status.

Assign roles to certain users that will immediately direct them to specialized screens upon login. For instance, Kiosk roles automatically log into the simplified “Kiosk” interface.

Restrict certain users from editing or deleting records.

Confine certain volunteers or employees creating or scheduling visits to a single location.

Hide certain advanced menu structures from lower-level employees and volunteers. For instance, the Setting menu, the Report menu, and the Inventory menu.

Hide or show— and optionally require— a variety of employee-facing fields to streamline employees’ workflow.

Toggle entire widgets to dramatically shape the main dashboard. Toggle Client Notes, Household Proxies, Scheduling, Registrations, Visits, and Referrals.

The Kiosk home Page is just a search bar for finding and checking in clients.

Use bar code scanning to quickly pull up Client records by their account number.

Easy check-in with just two intake screens: registration and visit.

Create a Kiosk user for your pantry and login with a tablet. Watch a new client click the New Client button, register themselves, and be immediately directed to a visit screen for the day’s visit.

Optionally, allow your brand new clients to register themselves online. Otherwise manually create login credentials for them through the regular dashboard.

A client that visits your online PantrySOFT™ portal is directed to confirm their registration. This saves valuable time during the check-in process.

Allow clients to schedule an appointment for themselves from the availability slots you set up beforehand. This is necessary for the online store, but you can use it as an isolated feature.

A client that visits your online PantrySOFT™ portal is directed to confirm their registration, then choose a food pickup time.

Allow clients to choose goods from your inventory after they’ve self-scheduled a visit.

A client that visits your online PantrySOFT™ portal is directed to confirm their registration, then choose a food pickup time, and then they’re directed to the online store where they can choose items from your inventory to receive on their next visit.

Optionally set up quantity restrictions for individual items and/or groups of items. This can be used in conjunction with a credit tier system.

Add a “Dairy” Inventory Item Type and give it a visit limit of 3. Assign this type to an Inventory Item: “Milk, 1qt. 2%”. If an online customer that had already chosen two other “Dairy” items also wanted the milk, they could only get one.

Optionally use a credit system to allow clients to purchase goods from your inventory with your own “pantry credits”.

Add a Rotisserie Chicken item and assign it a cost of 5 credits. Customers with 5 credits in their account can select the Rotisserie Chicken in the online store, and pick it up at their next visit.

Optionally create multiple tiers of credit allotment and assign them to households based on, say, family size. Optionally allow PantrySOFT™ to distribute credits to each household based at regular automatic intervals. Otherwise, distribute credits manually.

Create three credit tiers: “1-2 People,” “3-5 People”, and “6+ People”. Assign to these tiers 50, 75, and 100 credits respectively. When a new family of 5 registers with you, assign them to the “3-5 People” credit tier and they’ll instantly be credited with 75 credits to shop at your online store.

Choose from a variety of languages to automatically translate the store items to match your clients’ native language.

A Spanish-speaking client clicks the globe icon on the online portal and chooses Español from a drop-down list. All fields and items on the online portal are now translated to Spanish.