Site Disallowance Webinar

So welcome everyone. You have joined us for the CenterPilot seminar webinar on decreasing disallowances. And so what I'm going to do is just start here. This is my test center, and we're on the login page for my test center. So I'll be showing you some information in CenterPilot, and we'll be discussing disallowances and reasons why we should try to correct them. So first of all, why should we try to decrease our disallowances? Well, they're all very important, but mostly it decreases your reimbursement.

Clearly, you've served the food, so it would be nice if you would get reimbursed for serving the food. It affects wages on the center level and on the sponsor level. So anybody that is paid with CACFP funds, you need that money to pay those individuals. It can affect the amount and especially the quality of the food purchased. So if your reimbursement is lower than it should be, you might be tempted to buy less nutritious foods or something more affordable, when in fact, you could have more money to purchase higher quality food.

Not only does it decrease the center reimbursement, but it also decreases the sponsor fee, and we'll be talking about that some. So your sponsor needs to pay their staff as well and pay their expenses. And they are paid based on a percentage of what their clients make. It affects your blended rate at the center. So I hope you know what the blended rate is. That is the rate that you're paid based on the number of free, reduced, and paid students that are enrolled at your center.

So if you have form disallowances, that definitely has a direct effect on the blended rate. And finally, it affects the USDA program nationwide. Errors on any level make the program look bad, and we just all look better if we have less disallowances. I'm going to go ahead and mute somebody because we have some background noise, or try to anyway. Okay. So there we go. Everybody is muted. So I did want to let you know before we get too far into this that we will be opening it up for questions at the end.

And you do have a chat box, so please feel free to chat questions at any point during the webinar as well. So now we know some reasons why we should be decreasing our disallowances. But how do you even know if you have disallowances? Let's look at some of the places in CenterPilot where you can see what disallowances you have for either a single month or for multiple months. The most obvious place would be to go to a claim report, the last one listed, which is called Claim Receipts.

And if you're submitting live claims, which most of you should be submitting live claims, then you will click on Live Claim Payment Receipts. If you're actually turning in non-live forms to your sponsor, in other words, you're not submitting live claims, you're submitting claims on paper, then your results will be under Non-Live Claim Payment Receipts. So we'll just click on this, and we're going to look at the month of January for my test site.

So you can choose whatever month you want, and these are the results that are from the January claim. So I'm going to try to remember to download everything so that it's better to see on your end, if I download it. So here for the January claim for this test center, here's everything that happened. So you have a lot of information on this report.

And just keep in mind that if you don't see it right after you submit your claim, it's because your claim first has to be set to complete by your sponsor before any of the claim reports will show up for you. So if it's a day or two after you submit your claim, there's no reason to panic. It just hasn't been set to complete yet. Come back in a day or so, and you should be able to see the results.

So here at the bottom, we have a result grid, Disallowance Result Grid, and we have the different types of disallowances, which we'll be going over soon. And then we have the meals over here in the left hand column. So what you see is the total meals served, which in a real center would be much higher than my test center. And then you have the information about the disallowances by type. So this center for breakfast in January had one enrollment form failure.

So one participant was not correctly enrolled, which we'll be discussing in more detail. We had 21 point of service failures, or 21 meals due to a point of service failure, 21 breakfasts. And we'll be looking at this in more detail, but I do believe it was one meal on one day that just resulted in 21 errors. We have no school age failures. Excuse me. School age failure would mean if a school age child was claimed when school is normally in session, and so we'll be discussing all of these in more detail. Too many failures, we had three.

That means that at least one participant was claimed for too many meals in one day. And that doesn't mean it's necessarily what we call an error. It just means that The federal government only allows every participant to be claimed for two main meals and one snack. So if they were claimed for a breakfast, lunch, snack, and supper, then the breakfast would be disallowed. And again, it's not necessarily an error unless your sponsor requests that you don't claim the extra meals.

We had no whole grain failures, which means that every day that was claimed had at least one whole grain serving. And then we have an adjustment amount of negative seven, and this is just something that the sponsor put in. And so you can see the adjustments down here. So there's more detail on these two bottom grids on meal adjustments. " And this says 4/1, which is an error. I don't think I put in April, so that would be showing up incorrectly down here. So just ignore that for the time period. So this grid only tells you so much.

It still doesn't give you all of the details, like where was my point of service error? Who was the participant that had an enrollment failure? So there's one report, the live claim payments receipt, and now we'll look at another place where you can find your disallowances, and it's basically in the same layout. And this is a claim report called monthly claim result summary. And so we're going to choose the month of January to look out for this, but notice that with this one, you can choose multiple months.

And we'll download it so you can see it, and it's basically the same grid that you just saw. So here again, we have the 32 meals served. We have the one enrollment form failure. We have the 21 point of service failures, the three too manys, the seven that were deducted by the sponsor. And so this is the very same grid. We just want you to know that that report is also on there. We have the function called a disallowance search report. So that is under claim reports, and it is the next one down, disallowance search.

So let's just say we were just looking at that grid, and we know we have one enrollment form failure for January, but we want to know who that is. So let's go back and see if we can search for just that type of error for the month of January. So we're going to select the disallowance, and the one we're going to select is forms. And you can see that we get more detail from this report, and it's just that one type of disallowance, and we could go back and search for others as well.

So here we have the name of the participant that had an enrollment form failure, and it says Enrolled F. That means false. So CenterPilot is saying that this participant is not enrolled. And so they were claimed for one breakfast and one supper, and that is what was disallowed because this person was not enrolled. So that's how you can get a little more detail, and you can do the same for the point of service errors for this month. And we'll download this one. So here you have more detail.

You have the actual meal date and the meal, and you have what happened. So in this particular grid, it's actual and then planned. So you can see that we claimed 14 participants in this age group when we only planned for three, and here with the school-agers, we claimed six when we only planned for three. So that's where the point of service error came from, and this is how you can find out what meal it was. Now, there is one more place that gives you more detail, and that is in your claim history.

Again, your claim must be set to complete by your sponsor before it shows up in claim history. And you can see more than-- We're going to just let multiple months appear. So here's for this year, from January through May, these are the claims that were submitted by this particular site. So let's look at that January claim by clicking on View, and here are all of the details on the claim. And on this screen, you can see that we have more detailed results for those disallowances.

So when you look at the bottom, first of all, here's the claim issue grid, and you're going to see those very same numbers again. The one form failure here, the 21 point of service breakfasts that were disallowed here, and the too many failures here. Here's the adjustments by the sponsor. And here, again, is the information on who had the enrollment form failure. Here is the point of service meal failure.

Here's a whole grain grid, and we're not showing any failures here, which we're also not showing in the grid, and we're not showing any school age failures here, and also not in the grid. Okay, so now we've talked about different reports that you can go to find out how you did on your claim and if you had any disallowances. So we saw the claim payment receipts, and we know that it doesn't show all of the details. It just gives an overview, and the very same information is on that monthly live claim result summary.

You can search by specific disallowance using that disallowance search function, and all of these are under claim reports again. And some of them you can search many months and some of them only one. And then, of course, the claim history, which we are on now. Okay, let's talk about the search for the too many. Because there's not anywhere else, like on a grid somewhere, you do have too many in a grid, but you're not going to see a separate explanation grid for the too many errors.

So for that error, if you want to see which participants are being fed more than two main meals and one snack, you could use your disallowance search report for that. And again, we'll go back to our test month for this webinar, which is January, just because I had the errors that I needed to show for that month. And here we have the choice for too many errors. So this is where you can get that information. Again, I'll download that so you can see it better. And so here are the three participants that... Sorry, my phone was ringing.

I hope that's not someone trying to get into the webinar. It's no problem. And that would be Siri. I'm so sorry. I'm over-clicking. So here are the three participants that had too many meals on this particular day. So it was the 21st of January, and you can see we had three participants that were claimed for breakfast, they were claimed for lunch, for snack, and for supper. So the breakfast would have been disallowed. So the CenterPilot is set up to pay what would give the facility the highest reimbursement.

Lunch and supper are the two highest reimbursable meals, and you're allowed two meals and one snack, so it would be the breakfast in this case that would be disallowed. Okay. Let's see if I have any chat questions, and I don't see any. Okay, so let's talk a little more detail about the types of disallowances. So form failures. Form failures obviously would mean that you are missing a form of some sort for an individual or a participant in your program.

This could happen if it is a newly enrolled participant and you have not yet collected the forms and turned them into your sponsor. All form failures are going to show up a default to paid. So a new participant, until they are verified or validated as free or reduced by your sponsor, will remain paid. Also, it could refer to the expiration of a form.

So unless you're running an at-risk site or a Head Start site or an emergency shelter where validation is not required, once a year, all participants will expire, and they will default back to paid. So that's going to result in a form failure for that month on your claim.

So a point of service failure, and some of you have been in on other webinars, so you're familiar with all of the lingo, but the point of service failure basically happens when you have not planned for enough food to feed all of the participants who were in care and claimed for a meal for that day. A school-age failure is just again going to refer to if you have claimed school-age children on a day when school is normally in session and you have not given an excuse, those will show up on the claim. They are not automatically disallowed.

Your sponsor can then make the decision to allow or disallow. So you might want to keep in touch with your sponsor on that. Just use the message function, let your sponsor know that it's a school holiday in your district, and you will have school-agers present. The too many failure, we've talked about. We just showed you an example of that, and it's still showing here. The whole grain failures. There are many edit checks programmed in the CenterPilot that should prevent whole grain failures. However, they are still possible.

So if a whole grain failure shows up, that means that whole grains must have been edited out of your meal, a meal on a certain day. So as you know, it is a federal requirement that a whole grain be served at least once in all of the meals that are served for that day. So if you have a whole grain failure... Well, when you are setting up, first of all, your pre-saved week, you are not allowed to save a day that does not have a whole grain. So there's an edit check right there.

Also, if you'll know, and that's another webinar or video if you need to look into creating your pre-saved meal week, you would do it from here. Also, if you will look on your facility homepage, and you should be checking this daily, you can see that there's another edit check here. So if you see green in this column where the day has whole grain, that means that there is a meal in that day that has whole grain. Notice that on Monday on this week, we have red. But I actually deleted the meals for Monday. So we're not open on Monday.

So if this was a day that was open and these other columns were yellow up here, then this would be something that I would need to go check and make sure I put a whole grain back into the meal. So it is possible to edit out a whole grain. So if we were to look at, I guess today is Thursday, if we were to look at Thursday's meals, and so it says we have a whole grain, but we needed to change a meal.

So if we went through this function, which is meal or create, edit participant meals, and we edited a meal, and for this test center, you can see that we serve breakfast, lunch, snack, and supper. But if we edited the meal and it was the meal that had a whole grain, and we edited the whole grain out, then you're going to have a whole grain failure. So even though there are edit checks in place, it is not impossible to end up with a whole grain error. And then there are errors that are sponsor disallowances.

So when your claim is being processed, you may have disallowances that are-- they're called meal adjustments that are put in by your sponsor. And we saw some of those on the claim receipts report. And again, we'll just bring that back up so that we can show you. So we're looking at the January claim and the results from that claim. So here at the bottom, we have the meal adjustments. So these were disallowances that were added by your sponsor. Again, in this scenario, they had a parent contact, and because of that, those meals were disallowed.

It also could be from a monitor visit. So if the facility was monitored and there were days in the past where you could not produce records. For instance, you might be behind on CenterPilot with taking the meal counts, and you can't produce records that you took meal counts on paper. So, that would be an example of when the sponsor would put in a disallowance when they were going over your claim. And then parent reviews incomplete forms. If they know that non-creditable foods were served, then that would be a sponsor disallowance.

So how do we correct errors that result in disallowances? Because this is our main goal is to not have the errors. So let's talk about the forms. So one thing that you need to remember is to pay attention on your facility homepage. If you scroll down, you have the information right here on your homepage of who is about to expire, and it gives you 60 days notice and tells you the date that the forms are expiring for certain participants.

You also have the information on those who have expired, and you have information of if the sponsor sent you an eligibility alert. So for Ava, you did turn in an enrollment form and a meal benefit form, but the information was incomplete. So your sponsor notified you of that. So keep that in mind. So, don't just assume that, oh, I turned that in, so everything's good. If you see an alert show up, make sure you just check into that and correct the missing information. So a new enrollee.

When someone enrolls in the CenterPilot, you really need to recheck and update your default expected numbers. So that would be from facility information. And it's the number attending meals. And it's very hard for you to see this, I know, but so you've had a new student or two that have enrolled this month.

Immediately go check your default numbers, because if you don't, that could result in some point of service errors that month, because you need to make sure that you have enough food to feed the new children as well as the children that were already in care. So you want to make sure you have enough food to purchase or enough food purchased. You want to make sure your meal production records show enough food to be open. So make sure that you recheck these numbers when you enroll new children or new participants.

Also, you must have the participants entered into CenterPilot in order to take the attendance at the meals for these participants. So you do want to enter the new participants right away. What happens when you do enter the new participants is that it immediately will affect your blended rate, which is your ratio of free reduced paid. And remember that that new participant, until validated as anything else free reduced, that participant will be on the paid level until validated otherwise.

So pay attention to the home screen and make sure that you update these numbers. Your expired forms also will default to paid. So any participants, let's go down here and look at this again. So this participant here, since the form expired, this participant has now defaulted to paid status. So if that should be a free status, that's why you need to pay attention to that, because that has affected your free reduced paid ratio and not in a positive way. So pay attention to this chart, and then communicate with your sponsor.

Also communicate with your parents. Really, your parents should know that it's a requirement for their child to be in care, that they have all of the paperwork filled out when needed. So that's up to you to make sure that they know that. So you can use the message function, which is also on this page, and this message was from our sponsor, and it reminded the director to submit the enrollment information for the new and expiring participants. But you can also click send message and send a message to your sponsor.

" And then continue, even when you get the forms in, continue to watch this screen because you should see when you get the forms in for Sarah and Samaya, you should eventually see them disappear from the screen. And if it's been a few weeks and they have not disappeared, contact your sponsor and confirm that they received those forms. It could just be that the sponsor, the person who processes monitor forms, is on vacation and will do them next week.

But really, you should pay attention and not just assume that they've received them if you don't see the participant disappear from the screen. And if they're new enrollees on the participant page, and I don't know who's new, so I'm just going to bring someone up. But if they're not a new enrollee, then you will see that the enrollment form and the meal benefit form are showing as complete. But new forms, new participants will show incomplete in red text.

So again, if it's been a couple of weeks and they still show incomplete, go ahead and contact your sponsor. And remember that it affects your blended rate. New participants default to paid, expiring participants default to paid. Okay, now let's talk about correcting point of service errors. Once again, one of the easiest things to do is to just recheck your default numbers under participant information and make sure that these are correct. Check them often. Might even think about padding them a bit.

I know in some of my other webinars, I encourage you to pad the numbers in each age group just a little bit, so that if someone ages out to the next group, it doesn't cause a POS error. And also, if an extra child that you're not expecting shows up for one day, it doesn't cause an error because you've padded the numbers just a little bit. You don't want to over-pad them, because then CenterPilot will tell you to purchase too much food, and the milk banks will tell you you need more milk than you need.

The meal production records will show that you need to open more food than you actually should. But you do want to pad a little bit for aging out, for having an extra child in care, and to accommodate for spillage, et cetera, in the kitchen. Make sure you print your meal production records and have them posted in the kitchen well in advance of the meal. And be sure enough food is ordered, and then be sure the cook is opening the minimum amounts of the food to serve the number of participants that will be having lunch.

If you're a center that also feeds adults, make sure that adults are included in your numbers. I know in Head Start centers you can't claim the adults for reimbursement, clearly. But if you are modeling eating behaviors in the classroom, you might want to pad your three to five-year-olds to include the teachers so that enough food is served, and the teachers will not be eating adult portions. They're just simply eating small portions in front of the child to model eating behaviors.

So if you put the numbers over here in the adult section, this is going to calculate the amount needed in the adult daycare, which is a lot of food. So that's something you might want to keep in mind. And also check your home screen every day. So if you were to see purple show up in any meals that you've served, that means that attendance was taken, and more participants were claimed for the meal than food was planned for the meal. So if you see purple show up today for breakfast, then that's something you need to look at.

If enough food really was served and you can prove that, then you can go edit that meal and take out the POS failure. But if enough food was not served, you should leave it and have it disallowed. And the way to edit it out is through meals, create edit participant meals, and change the expected numbers for that meal. Okay, how would you correct or keep whole grain errors from happening? First of all, you can't correct a whole grain error if you really had one, if it's in the past.

So if you edited out a whole grain for the day and that's really what was served, then that will be a disallowance. But just be sure that you're checking to make sure this column here is green and that you have not edited out a whole grain. And occasionally, we recommend that you go recheck all of your pre-saved meals. So you can bring up your pre-saved meals here, which is just in the pre-saved meals section, and you can just see what you have.

And you can make sure that you're saying in the title that there is a whole grain, and you want to make sure that you have pulled in your whole grains from this dropdown on the right, not the grain dropdown on the left. CenterPilot only recognizes foods from this dropdown as whole grains. So recheck your pre-saved meals. Another easy way to do that is to run the report, the pre-saved meals list, and print it out so that you can just really look at it. Without printing it out, you can check it online.

And when they come up, first of all, you're checking the name to make sure it's correct. You're also checking the components. Make sure that it pulled in a whole grain if it has whole grain in the title. So every once in a while, check those pre-saved meals. The other thing you're checking is, do you still buy the 1% milk in the gallon? Do you still buy the wheat cereal in the 18-ounce box? If not, if it's no longer available, this needs to be edited and updated. So once in a while, you'll want to do that. Okay.

Let's talk about the daily records. That's a huge disallowance if your sponsor checks up on you and notices that you're not keeping your records daily, or it is obvious at a monitor visit. com, we have what we call a task manager, and we send this out to all new sponsors. But if you haven't used it, if you are a sponsor, make sure you're sending this to your new programs that sign on your new facilities.

And if you're out there on a monitor visit, and it's obvious that no one knows what someone else is doing, then bring it up again and see if you can get them to start using it. com and click on Resources, and go through this document with your staff and make sure everybody knows what they are responsible for. So who is going to create the pre-saved meals, weeks, and schedules? Designate a person and write the name here or have them sign off on it. Who's responsible for printing and distributing the meal production records?

Somebody should be responsible for that. " No, it's this person. Who verifies the accuracy of the meal production records? Who updates the changes to the meal production records in CenterPilot? So if the cook makes notes over in the note column, who puts those notes back into CenterPilot, and how often? Who records the meal attendances on paper templates, and then who transfers it into CenterPilot? If you're doing direct entry, then you might want to skip that part. But who is responsible for directly entering the meal attendance?

So all of these. Who enters receipts? Who submits the records to the sponsors? That would be like your meal production records if your sponsor requires that they be sent in. Weekly attendance sheets. What about the enrollment and meal benefit forms? Who submits those? So get it all in writing and let your staff know who is responsible. This would show teamwork. If you're a team, it's also more professional because when your sponsor shows up to monitor, everything's done, and everybody knows what they're responsible for.

And it just makes you look professional. It shows that you're a team. By the way, it does make your sponsor look better when everything is up to date and done, and it makes the entire program nationally look better. If errors are predominant in the program, then programs sometimes don't make it. So you want your program to be available. You don't want to see the food program go away. And you really did serve the food, so why not be reimbursed for it?

And so if you keep up with records, you're going to get reimbursed for food that you really did serve, and it results in more money to buy higher quality food and to pay your CACFP staff. Your cook wants to be paid, so you need the money to do that. Okay, so now let's talk about milk shortages. If you are not familiar with the milk bank, you really should be checking that often. So let's look at the milk bank for this month for my test center.

And so what you're looking for is to, as you go through the month, you want to make sure you don't see checks in this disallow column. The milk bank does not automatically disallow, but it tells your sponsor during claim time that they may want to go check because it shows a check here. So that means that as of June 1st, at breakfast, we were short on milk. We didn't have the required amount of milk. So if you see checks and you know you had enough milk, check a few things over.

First of all, is the first line, does it show carryover from last month? We all don't buy milk on the first day of the month. So if you had several gallons left over from last month, you want to make sure it carries over. com that deals with the milk bank and adding receipts. But what you need to do is bring up the past month and then click Process Milk, and that will carry over milk to the current month. The other thing to check if you do have carryover, but you're still seeing check marks, did you enter receipts in a timely manner?

So go back and check to make sure you entered the receipts. And if you entered them, did you credit milk towards that receipt? Because you want the purchased milk to show up here. Like on this day, we have a receipt entered that says that we purchased two gallons of skim milk and two gallons of whole milk. So those need to show up, and they have to be added to your receipt to show up in the milk bank. Were the receipts uploaded and/or forwarded to your sponsor? And that would be on the receipt entry screen.

So for any receipts, if you see this arrow, that means that you do have a receipt uploaded. This is actually the easiest way to get the receipts to your sponsor. You won't lose them. Your sponsor doesn't have to wait to receive them from email, and you don't forget. You've uploaded the receipt. So your sponsor, even if you say that you purchased milk, you have to prove it to your sponsor. So you have to show them the receipt. And are you entering your receipts immediately in a timely manner?

That makes your milk bank more accurate, and also you don't forget to enter them, and you don't forget to upload them so that your sponsor can see them right away. You need to think about milk rounding issues, and especially dealing with whole milk. So just remember that if only a few one-year-olds are in care, even if you purchase your whole milk by the gallon, in your pre-saved meals, go ahead and schedule milk by the cup.

13 gallons of whole milk, if you have three one-year-olds, it will show you need one and a half cups, and then the milk bank stays more accurate at that point as well. And then also pay attention to how much milk is being returned unpoured to the kitchen. You should make sure that the minimum amounts are poured in the classroom, but if milk is returned, then you need to make sure you update CenterPilot on the amount that's returned. Okay, so that's what we have to talk about for milk shortages.

And so just make the effort to not be disallowed for milk errors as well. The too many errors, again, really cannot be corrected unless your sponsor requests that you don't put all of the meals that you serve in CenterPilot. You can put them in, just know that CenterPilot's only going to pay you for two main meals and one snack. So it's not necessarily something that needs to be corrected because it's not really considered an error. Now let's talk a bit about capacity issues.

These show up on your claim when your sponsor processes your claim, but they're not automatically disallowed. And I'm logged in as a center, not as a sponsor, so you would not see those capacity issues show up anyway. First of all, the easiest thing is just to stay in capacity. But if you have situations where you have, like at snack, your capacity is 50, and you feed 50 kids, and then you have another 15 kids that arrive from school, but 15 of your preschoolers or infants have gone for the day.

Then you need to make sure you're setting up two meal times, and that is under facility information and on the meal serve tab. So down here, you can set up second meal service times. Now, you will have to have your sponsor put the meal service in for you. But let's talk about the same thing, the snack issue. So you serve your first snack from 3:00 to 4:00, but at 4:10, 15 schoolers arrive. So then you need another PM snack scheduled for 4:15 to 5:00 or something.

And then if 15 kids have already gone home, then you're not out of capacity to feed the 15 that just came to the facility. So CenterPilot knows if you have two meal times set up, that it allows for two times the capacity at the meal. It will show capacity errors if it's more than two times. So again, if you have 50 and you have two meal times, 50 is your capacity, sorry, and you have two PM snacks, then it's going to allow for up to 100 kids to be claimed at PM snack. But if 101 are claimed, then you still have capacity issues. So, okay.

So now what I'd like to do, and we are going to have time for questions and answers at the end, but I want to show you a scenario, and this is an actual center. So what I did was I went to claim history for an actual center in Texas that is having a lot of disallowances, and I want to show you what happened for an entire year for this center. So here's all of the months. Hopefully, you can see the worksheet. But here's all of the months of last year, January through December, and here's the amount of money that this sponsor was disallowed.

And also, we just put the lunch rate so that you can see what the form errors, how it affects the blended rate. So without being too complicated, let's just look at January. So the form errors, this is a large site, about, I think, 250 capacity. So it's a pretty large center. So in January alone, they were out almost $1,200 just on form errors. And then they had no POS errors that month. So this is the amount that they were paid, but they were disallowed almost $2,000. I'm sorry, $1,200. And this was their lunch rate.

Now look at the very next month. They're getting better on the form errors. They've cut this amount more than in half, but Then they had point of service errors. So they're still disallowed almost $1,200. But look at the rate, the difference in the lunch rate, because the form errors were less. So it's the form errors that really can drastically affect your blended rate. Unfortunately, once you start correcting these errors, you don't want these to become more.

In March, there was a monitor visit performed, and so what happened was there were no meal counts or meal production records. The monitor visit was March 27th or something, and so there was no claim submitted. So there was zero paid to the facility, and that also means that the sponsor got zero amount. But here's still the breakdown. So they were still disallowed an entire claim. So $4,200, they were disallowed because they didn't keep up with their records and didn't have a payable claim.

In April, we're back up on the form failures, and the POS have just gone crazy. So once again, for a month that we were paid for, almost $4,000 was disallowed from the claim. And in May, we went way down again. We have no POS, so we went down again, but still $600. I mean, that's still nothing to snooze at. But look how much, because we went down on the errors, how much higher the claim is. And look how much our lunch rate went up here. And so we could just go through and talk about every month.

Now, I'd like to point out that we had a huge jump in the lunch rate here. But between June and July, that's when the federal government raises the reimbursement rates. So part of it is a raise in the government rate, but it's also because we cut down on form fillers. I mean, look, only $123, which I know I say only, but compared to almost $1,200 and compared to $1,600 here, that's a vast improvement, and it majorly affects our blended rate. In August, we had another monitor visit, and guess what? We didn't get any better.

So based on the average amount of a paid claim, we're once again down $4,000-ish. And it just goes on and on. So let's look at the totals now. So you get the drift of what's happening for this year. So if you look at the totals, then we have almost $7,000 in form errors for the year, $11,000-plus for POS and other errors, for a total of $22,000 that was not paid out to this center. So the amount paid was $50,000, but it should have been almost $73,000 that should have been paid.

And remember, this affects your sponsor as well because they're paid a percentage. So they had got less money because the center didn't correct their errors and keep up with forms. That's an error as well. So, the real loss for the center and sponsor for this entire year is much higher due to the fact that if they'd kept up with forms, these rates would have been higher, resulting in more money that would have been paid out.

So I hope that makes sense, but that's another reason to look at that task manager and to make sure everybody's doing their job. So okay, so that's a real-life scenario of a center that didn't receive a lot of money last year. And keep in mind that the sponsor still has to pay their monitor. If there's a zero claim for the month that they monitored, that monitor still has to be paid for their time. They still have to be paid for the time to process the claim and show the disallowances.

They still have to be paid for mileage reimbursement, and the sponsor's not getting any money off of this center to pay their employees or their staff. Okay. So I just want to now-- I don't know if I have the ability to unmute everyone. I can try, but it pretty much doesn't work that way on this app anymore. So I can click Unmute, but it doesn't do anything. So what I'd really like to do is just to allow you to ask questions. So just go ahead and unmute yourself and ask a question. And it looks like you're trying.

So somebody unmuted, but you're not connected to audio. So you may have to chat the message. And I thought I could right click and send you a pin, but... Anybody else? Does anybody have any questions or comments? I had put in the email that you might want to send in your questions in advance, and I did not receive any questions. So I'll just give it another minute in case you're trying to unmute. Hello, Angela, can you hear me? I can, yes. This is [an attendee] from [a sponsor organization]. Hi there. Hi, how are you? Good, and you? Good, thank you.

You had mentioned something about converting the milk when you were talking about the milk shortages, converting the milk into cups instead of gallons. Can you just repeat what you had said? I didn't write everything down. Okay. So Okay. So what CenterPilot does is, let's just use whole milk as an example. If you purchase that in a gallon but you have very few one-year-olds, so let's say you have an average of five one-year-olds per meal, an average.

So if you're putting it in your pre-saved meals, when you're building your pre-saved meals, or you can edit it. Let's just go edit one. So let's just say at breakfast, we're just going to bring up a meal. So we'll bring up Cheerios, bananas, and milk. And hopefully you can see what I'm doing. Now you can see that I wrote down that I purchased my whole milk in a half gallon.

" And so if you open the entire thing, and you tell CenterPilot, well, CenterPilot thinks you served half a gallon, but you may only be serving half of your half gallon here. 13, just a few cups. Let's go ahead and make this five here, and we'll see it update. So it's updated now that it says we need two and a half cups. So what you can do is go up here to your whole milk and change it from half gallon to, it's called half pint or a cup.

So a cup is a half pint and then there's two cups in a pint, four cups in a quart, eight cups in a half gallon, and 16 cups in a gallon. So if you change it to cups, then it tells you you need two and a half cups. 13 of a container. So that helps CenterPilot not overstate the amount of whole milk needed, because it's going to tell you that you need to purchase more than you really do. So I hope that makes sense. Okay. But that's how you would do the conversion just in your pre-saved meals. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Hi, Angela.

This is [an attendee] with El Paso Human Services. Hi there. Hi. We got in a little bit late because we didn't have the right code. Can you show me where I print the report, or I can get the report of the claim for that month? What was paid, what was- Mm-hmm ... not paid? Yeah. Can you go- Yeah. So if you click on Claim, Reports, and the last one is called Claim Receipts. Uh-huh. You guys submit live claims, so if you would click on Live Claim Payment Receipt.

Now I know you're a sponsor, so you would then choose who you want to see this for, and I think you might be able to choose all facilities. So, then you choose your claim month and Get Report. And this is going to be for one facility because I'm logged in as a site, but it's this record here. So this is going to tell you, and I'll download it again so you can see it better.

Okay, so this tells you how much was actually paid, how much was meal reimbursement, how much your sponsor was paid in admin, or how much they held out, and then your claim payment. And these are your current rates for this month. So these will change monthly as you enroll children into your facility based on the free/reduced price ratio. They're not the same every month because they're a blended rate. And then this is where you see the different disallowances.

But to get more detail from them, you can look in another place for details on the disallowances. And since you came in late, and I apologize if you had the wrong code, but to find more details, you can either go to Claim History and bring up the claim, or you can go to the Disallow Search report and search by disallowance, search by forms disallowance, by point of service disallowances, et cetera. Okay. That help? Yes. Okay, and I think we had a chat question.

"In December, I served turkey meatballs one day for lunch when our rep came from her sponsor. It wasn't until we submitted the claim in January that we found out we were disallowed that meal. " Okay. So that's another reason for whoever it is in your facility to be checking everything. So, they should be going and checking disallowances monthly so that they'll know things like that. So if you're disallowed for something, and I think you might be a kitchen person.

So I think what the issue is, is you say you again served the same meal, which wasn't reimbursable because no one made you aware that it wasn't an allowable component or meal. So, yeah, that's just another reason to be checking the disallowances. So it would probably show up under a meal adjustment, and if it doesn't give enough information, then you can contact the sponsor and ask what happened. But yeah, unfortunately, I'm sorry that you served it twice before you found out it wasn't allowed.

But that's just another reason to keep up with disallowances so that you can make the adjustments right away and correct them right away. I hope that answers it for you. Angela, this is Charlotte from Springbok. I'm the one that asked that question in chat. I guess my issue is when I was serving them She said nothing to me at all.

And I just think that it's completely unfair to be blindsided like that several weeks later, not only for me as the one who's serving that meal, but also to my employer, to the director of the school, to be disallowed that item. And those items had been served here prior to my coming in and taking over the duties of the kitchen. So, we're at a loss of that. Yes. Well, and that's unfortunate. I do think that there are members of your sponsor that are on today.

So, what I just suggest is that you all get together and discuss that, and hopefully you can come up with a solution. Okay. Thank you. Uh-huh. Does anybody else have a question? When July do. This is [an attendee] from El Paso Human Services. Hi there. Hi. I've noticed that on our live claims, and when we try to fix the enrollment issues, there's children that have been dropped by the center. For example, some center might have dropped a child in May. However, in March, let's say March, he ate for one day. How can we fix that problem?

Because he's dropped, so even if he appears on the live claim as an enrollment issue, that child has been dropped. How can we narrow that drop date so it won't affect that meal or- Oh ... I just... Yeah. Well, okay. So, this might be a chance, and I know you're a sponsor, this might be a chance for some technical assistance with that site. You really need your sites to keep up with their drop dates because if that child really never participated, then if they were...

Let's just say, because what I hear you saying is that a child was enrolled in March- Mm-hmm ... and perhaps never participated. Was the child accidentally marked in attendance for a meal? I don't know. Okay. We just know that he's been dropped by the center. However, he's appearing in the enrollment issues under the live claim. So how do we fix that? Oh, you mean for May he's still showing? Um- For like on May claim? The bad thing about us, I guess, is we're being transferred in on a monthly basis, these centers are. Yes.

So some of the centers are trying to do the maintenance on their enrollments, and we are too, along with them. However, this is something that we frequently see. Okay. A dropped child under the live claim, but still it says he participated in a meal for one day. Okay. It could've been one day. That's why he was dropped because he hasn't been in the center since March, let's say. Okay. Well, I think, and I know El Paso you have asked to have a meeting with me. And whenever you guys decide, we're going to have a meeting.

So if you don't mind, if you could just keep a note of that question and table it, and let's talk about it when I'm meeting with your staff tomorrow, or let's say either this afternoon or tomorrow. I'm not sure if you guys chose a time. Would that be all right? That's fine, ma'am. No problem. Thank you. Okay. No problem. Okay, do we have anybody else that would like to ask a question? It looks like Carmen you may be trying to, and let me see if I can send you a pin. I don't think you have audio.

I sat in on a webinar on how to use GoToMeeting better, and it said I could right click and send you a pin, but I don't think you have audio, so... I'm sorry. I don't think you have microphone capabilities. So I'll wait a few minutes if you want to chat your question. And you would just click on the bubble to chat, and if you can't figure it out, you can always call me later with the question. In the meantime, does anybody else want to unmute and ask a question? Okay. Well, then I'm going to go ahead and call it good.

I think we've been on about an hour. So, let me just summarize today. We just request, and would like for everyone to begin to take action immediately to decrease disallowances. Be sure that you're immediately forwarding your required docs to your sponsor, and then confirm receipt. Make sure that they've received them. Submit your claim to your sponsor immediately at the end of each month. Keep up daily and submit immediately.

And the reason for that is if your sponsor has to wait for claims, if they have to wait for any forms or receipts, it's going to slow down claim processing on their part, and it delays them submitting their claim to the state, which delays them receiving money from the state, which delays you receiving money from your sponsor. So, it's just one of those things where if everybody will do their part and do things timely, then you get money faster. So, I don't see any other questions, and no one has unmuted, so I'll give you one more chance.

Anybody want to unmute and ask any questions? Hi, good afternoon. My name's Jeanette, and I'm also from El Paso Human Services. Hi. And I do have a question. My question is when we go to migrate meals, and we see it on our end We have to label every week by the name of the daycare. If not, it already happened. It's very possible for me to transfer a menu of a different daycare to the daycare that I want to transfer the menu to. Is there any way that we could do it in CenterPilot that would automatically identify the name of the daycare for us?

I'm not sure, but will you be able to join the meeting with me and your other staff members? Definitely. Okay. So that way we can go through together, and you can show me exactly what's happening, and we'll just address it specifically. Okay. So please take notes, El Paso, so that when we have our meeting, we can answer all of your questions. It looks like someone has chatted a question. Yes, this meeting is being recorded. com at some point. So keep checking back.

We post webinars and video trainings, and yes, this one will be posted as soon as we can get it kind of converted to a... Well, we have someone who converts them to short videos. So please, yeah. com. com. And you're very welcome. And so thank you, guys. I'm going to go ahead and get shut down now. So just really do appreciate you joining today. I appreciate your questions. We really thank you for using our product and ask that you ask, if you do have questions, please ask your sponsor or ask us directly, because we want this to work for you.

So thank you very much, and I'm going to stop

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