We send out an order form each month. Our scrip coordinator cut/pasted the form using the list of companies off of the Scrip company's website. Parents have one week to send back their completed order form with payment.
The scrip coordinator is supposed to log all the orders on a monthly control sheet, tally the cards on a tally sheet, and then place the consolidated order on-line in one transaction. That way we should be able to match all the incoming orders for the month with the incoming money and the outgoing payment to our scrip company.
I don't know if our Scrip company (GLS) allows customers to order directly through their website, but WE would never allow that unless the parent had to use a credit card for payment right then. With GLS, the payment for the cards that are ordered online is taken AUTOMATICALLY out of our PTO's checking account. This is a direct electronic debit which happens shortly after you submit the scrip order online. There is no guarantee that anyone paid your PTO for the scrip cards that you're ordering other than your PTO's own policies. You need to have tight controls over this so only cards that have been paid for are ordered.
We keep a few $5 cards on hand for our grocery store loyalty program because they are cheap, get reloaded at the store for ongoing donations, and we want to be able to sell them at every opportunity. The PTO pre-buys these directly from the grocery and then parents pay us the $5 for their card when they join the program. We don't carry any other scrip cards in inventory - our program is fairly new and parents aren't in the habit of buying scrip regularly. Keeping cards on hand wouldn't help our sales at this point. We order cards only as needed.
We have only one person running our scrip program, but it should be two (and it will be soon!). You should have one person collect the orders/money, prepare the tally and log, and total the cash for the treasurer to deposit. The other person should take the tally sheet from person #1 and place the order online. The risk we have with only one person doing it all is that she adds a card or two to the order that she'll pay for "soon". It's nearly impossible to track and id that kind of finagling (sp?) when only one person is involved. Makes it too tempting for honest people to take advantage of the system.
By the way, besides checking into the big scrip companies, check with your local grocery store chains. I believe we have the potential to make a lot more from our grocery scrip than we'll ever make off retail scrip. (we are a public school and scrip profit goes to the PTO, not back to individual tuition accounts).
One final thought: if you are looking at a scrip company that accepts credit card orders directly from the parents, carefully compare their profit margins to those from traditional scrip companies. If the scrip company accepts credit cards, they must make enough money to pay the credit card company their fees. I assume this would cut into the profit your PTO can make. If it all happens behind the scenes (that is, your parents place their orders themselves whenever they want), then it might be hard to keep up the awareness and enthusiasm of a regularly scheduled scrip order period that has flyers and deadlines. Just a thought to consider.
At our school we have a coordinator who sends out an order form with the kids for families to order from. Any order made by 3pm Monday is in by Friday. She does all the ordering and uses Great Lakes Scrip. It seems to work well that way. She also has volunteers before school and after school who sit at the scrip table and sell to parents. She keeps local grocery stores and fast food places on hand that don't need to be ordered. One other thing she does is keeps track of the profit for each family and when they reach $50 profit they get a $5 on any scrip. Hope this helps.
Our school is in the process of evaluating running a scrip program.
I am trying to decide the best way to go about it and have some questions:
1. Do most groups run their program by the families filling out an order form and submitting it to the school or do most families order through an online site directly (ie. nationalscrip/schoolpop) and the orders go directly to the school
2. With regards to online ordering how exactly does it work?? Families login, complete an order and then what?
3. Are there any additional sites/resources about scrip programs.
