Remember last week’s post about easily identifying purchased products within the online ordering function?  Well, today we’d like to offer another little tidbit of knowledge about how you can get a good sense of case counted products’ size and contents.

Case contents are actually pretty easy – and consistent, too!  For any given product, look at the “Packing” column.  The first number it lists is how many boxes or bags or cans (et cetera) come in the case.  If those boxes or bags (but probably not cans!) happen to contain smaller individual serving packets, there will be another ‘count’ number behind it – 2 ct or 6 count or 12 ct (et cetera).  The last number describes the weight of the number immediately preceding it; if there are individual serving packets, it describes each of those, but if there aren’t individual serving packets, it describes weight of the boxes or bags or cans (et cetera).

Let’s practice: the Gerber Natures Select are described as being packaged 9/2 ct/7 oz.  So there are nine items that you can hand out, each of which contains two 7 ounce containers.

The size aspect is still a work in progress, because we’re not quite used to doing the set up on our end.  We can take pictures and upload them to the site – so all you have to do is look for those items that have a camera icon next to the product description (right now there are 3).  Click on the camera, and it’ll take you to the product info page – including a picture of a case of the product, set against an indication of size, which should help you determine how many you can fit in your vehicle. We’ve been using a gallon water jug to show scale, but we’re planning to replace it with something to indicate more formal measurements soon.

Have another question about online ordering or a neat trick to share? Send your suggestions for this series of posts to eliannab@feedingamericawestmichigan.org.

If we learned one good thing from our agency survey (and really, we learned a lot!), it’s that we could all stand to find out more about the capabilities of our online ordering system (and an upgrade wouldn’t hurt either).  One respondent commented:

I would love to see the product list revised.  I’m sure there are many others, besides myself, who seldom order from the “purchased products” selections.  It would be much more efficient for me if there were two separate lists, one of the items I can get inexpensively and the other of the pricier items.

Well, we’re not going to make two separate lists – but we will tell you how you can get something of the same effect from all those drop down menus at the top of the ordering window:

You can choose to view product by their storage needs (in the first drop down), by product type (in the second drop down), and by category (in the third drop down).

Let’s break that down a little bit more: storage options are dry, refrigerated, and frozen. Type is the longest list: it uses headers like cereal, fruit, grains and so on.  Category is where you can distinguish purchased product, because “category” is about where the food comes from.

There are enough other categories that you might not want to look through them one at a time; your next best best is to use the fourth drop down, “Sort by,” to identify whatever aspects matter to you – could be storage, could be type – and if it’s purchased you care about, be sure to include category as one of the sorting choices.

Whatever drop down choices you make, you will have to click on the “Apply” button before the changes take effect; that action will make the list refresh automatically with your new settings.

Have another question about online ordering or a neat trick to share? Send your suggestions for this series of posts to eliannab@feedingamericawestmichigan.org.

Edit: If you don’t want to bother with using the drop down menus, you can always rely on the fact that the item numbers for purchased products start with a ’6′ (and for that matter, USDA products start with an ’8′).

Would you like to be able to

• Check your account balance,
  
• Get new copies of invoices,
  
• Print account statements, and
  
• Add product to submitted orders?

You’ll be able to do all these things and more when we reach our goal of $14,000 to purchase the WebWindow upgrade to our online ordering software.  That seems pretty steep, but when you figure that there are 1,300 agencies, you’ll notice that a $10 donation from one person at each agency will just about get us there.

So what do you say?  Give yourself  a gift (or several – we’ll hold any extra designated funds raised from this effort for other agency experience improvements):

For those of you who would rather send us a check by mail for this project, please include the designation “WebWindow” on the memo line.

Edit: That’s it folks – it’s gone.  Welcome to 2012.

Food Banks statewide are being asked to help step up the level of record-keeping that is being done by agencies handling TEFAP products.  We are therefore asking that a new version of the mandatory distribution log be in use by most agencies by the start of 2012 – mobile pantries, snack programs, and group homes are exempt.  Both the log and page-long release to be posted at those agencies should be customized with the agency’s name.  Agencies should also post the generic income guidelines for TEFAP.