Employee Meal Cards- payment type and gift card structure?

[GandHct]

Hello!  We are a deli/retail food store with 25+ employees at this location.

I'm hoping to create an employee meal plan where each employee has a plastic card, similar to a credit or gift card, where we are able to pre-load a certain amount of money each week that they can use towards their lunches/dinners while at work.  This would also allow us to track what and how much of an item they are eating (as of now, there is no system and they just take whatever they want from the deli, throwing inventory off).  So they would go to the register and we would ring them up, just the same as a customer, and they would pay with their employee meal card.  This would correspond with their employee number in the system for tracking/reporting.  Thanks for any insight as to how to achieve this type of program using square.  

[Donnie-M]

@GandHct If you don't mind me giving you some advice, I can understand what you are going for, but the logistics behind that type of system will become cumbersome and cost ineffective.  The second thing, most of the industry does not use a system like that to account for employee meals for this reason.  What I do is give a really really generous discount to my employees.  I give fountain drinks for free to employees.  Any retail style items (monster/coke/bottle drink/juice) cost 1$ no matter my cost to guarantee they aren't wasting the product and offset the cost.

For meals, I would set up a discount of say 50%, 75%, 100% whatever you are comfortable with and just require that EVERYTHING is rang up and discounted, even if it is promo'd off.  Most places will just print a receipt and put it in the drawer and you can kind of watch what people are eating each day.  The big thing is you can look at the "employee discount 100" and see what you are giving away each day.  A good industry example, A certain chicken place that is closed on Sunday's give a free meal each shift..it is an entree/combo side & drink.  No 20 count nuggets/desserts etc.  or a salad.  But the policy is one per shift and another employee or manager rings it up and they go through the line like normal.

This works really well, and you can be generous.  If you really wanted to get really really specific, just set up a discount for each employee with their name and the %.  It would be super easy then to see how much they are getting.  You can also drill down in the reports to see who is giving what discount.

[feedplan]

Check out Feedplan 
You can create an offer meal plans to customers.