ParentPay Reviews 4,442

They took money out of my sons account twice and left his account in arrears twice. Will be reported to FCA

When the system works, it's okay but it's beyond confusing to the say the least. Despite having a credit on my son's school lunches account, ParentPay have advised that we can't use it to pay! Needs simplifying and an overhaul. The customer service team do their best to respond to queries but are sadly let down by ParentPay's clunky interface and unreliable backup system.

I work in Finance at a secondary school and we hate the One-Click/Bank Transfer method of paying as it can easily lead to failed transactions. Lunch accounts can go overdrawn or parents have to pay again for trips leading to 2 lots of Parentpay charges. This term there have been more failed payments as the front screen now tries to encourage parents to set it up as the best way to pay. We advise all parents to pay by card payment as these transactions are pre-authorised. Parentpay haven't listened to our complaints saying parents want to pay that way. As the schools pay all the Parentpay fees I think we should have the choice. We are thinking of leaving them!

£20 has disappeared from my sons account t. I have emailed parent pay and got no response. This has also happened to a number of other children’s accounts at the same school. Surely they need to be investigated by the FCA!! Just another bad company appointed by the government

This company should be investigated.
Money keeps going missing from my child's parentpay balance.
I top up £20 per week for lunches which is more than enough as she only spends about £3 per day. By Friday all the money is gone and when she does her fingerprint thingy at the cafeteria, she has nothing left, when I go onto parent pay and tot up what she's spent Vs what I've paid in, it never adds up.
The school say it's parentpay who I need to talk to, parent pay say it's the school. Parents are passed around and messed around like we are not busy enough.
The school won't accept cash and my kid wants a hot meal so I'm stuck with parentpay.
This needs looking into, it's basically theft. Noone has responded to my emails but they will probably reply on here saying email us and we will help... Yeah right!

Terrible service that takes about half an hour every week to top up the money for school meals. It either doesn’t respond and times out or just takes you back to the log on page to start over again. Worst payment method for school meals I’ve ever used. Not fit for purpose!

Absolute cack, logged in for the first time and already had a negative balance, it seems they are happy for kids to run up balances that their parents are then on the hook for? Also, Ive no idea what Ive topped up, or what the random amounts comming out of my bank account are for, the site is crap, makes no sense and you cant keep track of whats being spent, but thats probably by design, utterly
atrocious and they need investigating. Id normally say "steer clear" but it doesnt apply here as theyve got the monopoly!

I’ve been having trouble logging in to parent pay for the last week and am unable to reset my password. I’ve contacted the school and they advised me to message the help section on the ParentPay website so I raised an enquiry and have sent two follow up emails chasing this up and have not received a response. Such a crap system and non existent customer service.

It actually does not work. The login detials provided via the school just say name not recongised. Not very user friendly or intuitive. Soured the move up to high school for my son who cant actually get a lunch thanks to this atrocious app. Why does everything have to go through this app, totally unessacary.

Dog s h i T that’s it
I don’t know how there isn’t another better system like this already, considering how notoriously bad parent pay is as a whole. It’s clear they’re the only oligopoly competitor in the market they’re in leading them to do whatever they want.

I’m not surprised with the amount of cases I hear of children having no lunch/snacks or being straight up denied to purchase any because their parents aren’t able to ACCESS the ONLY SERVICE that supports the card top up only scheme for secondary schools. Unfortunately my brothers fell victim to this a few times and I end up having to plan a day or 2 before to put their funds in which just shows how shi T T y and slow their servers are with constant crashes. It’s even disgustingly worse on the due day itself with card payments being unavailable

I just hope in the future that many schools abandon this poor excuse of a system just because it reduces their costs in the short run and commission someone to create a better system

Another awful experience with ParentPay.
Their system is down, yet their status page says all systems are operational. Impossible to get help as that link redirects to a page saying "We have found an error. this site is temporarily unavailable due to an unexpected error." Seriously, there is a great opportunity for someone to create a competitor to ParentPay and it wouldn't be difficult to do a lot better.

Too slow, they need to do better.

All the negative reviews are correct.

The system is absolute garbage. The UI is illogical and take you round in circles. The system uptime is ridiculous - I've lost count of the times I've logged in to do something and its either failed all together or taken 7 or 8 attempts to complete.

Try to top lunches? Fails probably 50% of the time. Either refuses to go to the payment page, or if it does, falls over half way through and gives you a message saying "No money has been taken". But of course money has been taken resulting in a lengthy argument with their disinterested customer services team.

Thankfully one of the schools our children attend has dumped them over the summer and have put in a reliable system that actually works. Hopefully the other school will follow suit as the school are getting sick of parents constantly complaining.

Behaves like its run on a Windows XP laptop in someones garage on a dialup connection with customer services to match.

Really poor interface in my opinion...confusing and non logical booking journey for preschool sessions and lunch orders :(
Recently raised a technical issue - 4 day response time and answer was generic and didn't address my issue. Sorry ParentPay but this app should be renamed ParentPain

Parent pay is awful. I did think it was just me but many of my fellow parents are having the same problems.

I have had the displeasure of using it for the first time this school year and not one part about it is nice to use.

Home screen-Book meals and places button right in the middle, simple enough. You then have to hit 'make or view bookings' again, simple enough, but why the double selection??

Click on each calendar day to select a meal, selection is highlighted, move onto the next day and the one you just chose is highlighted red in the calendar (this I assume means it is 'unconfirmed' until you click on confirm bookings at the end of the page - understandable) At this point there may or may not be an 'amount to pay' stated at the bottom.

You press confirm then a balance and/or a different balance than previously shown appears!!! Magic! But why the surprise??

Once confirmed there is no subtotal page to let you know what you are actually paying for in this particular transaction so you have to go back to the selection page and count how many meals you have ordered to figure out if they are charging you correctly.

However, you have to actually go back to the home screen to do this because when you go to 'continue shopping' it takes you to a completely useless 'payment items' screen that tells you nothing and that you can’t actually 'continue shopping' from AND with an even more useless 'help and guidance' video telling you how to make a payment...which, surely, you don't currently want to do if you've hit the 'continue shopping' button.....

Back to the 'confirm booking' button. You press it and assume by pressing the 'confirmed booking' button, it will actually 'confirm your booking' and turn the previous red selection to green..Right? WRONG. It’s is still flipping red but it has added the amount to the 'only there for show' 'amount to pay' total at the bottom. There is also a caveat at the top of the page warning you that any unconfirmed bookings must be paid in 2 hours or they will be cancelled again, understandable. But why do I have seemingly confirmed bookings in green that I've not yet paid for?

It’s also not obvious at all where a confirmed green cancelled in the event of illness. So I suppose we'll be charged for those ones because we didn't cancel it in time

The time it’s taken me to try and work this out it would have been easier, quicker and less stressful to grow the wheat, churn the butter, raise the animals and slaughter them myself to send my kid in with a ham sandwich instead.

Also no option to choose ‘don’t ask me again’ on the ‘set up one click payments’. Ain’t no way I’m trusting this with any kind of saved bank details.

Parent Pay - whatever company you use or have used for your user experience trials (if at all..) you need to sack them and get a refund. They have done you no favours. If you haven't in fact used anyone for this purpose, I suggest you get on it asap.

They are the most helpful, knowledgeable customer service I have spoken to. They are so helpful and friendly. I have never spoken to anyone there who didn't know the answer to my query. Nor anyone that isn't extremely helpful. Over the past week I have spoken to them a few times A********

ParentPay have the worst digital product I have ever used hands down, and I'm forced to use it on a weekly basis, because my daughter's school uses them for lunch choices. If I could fire them, I would happily do so. Whoever is procuring and paying actual money to this company needs to take a good look the next time an invoice comes through. You can pay for so much better. Or build better. Or the school could just go back to pen and paper for lunch choices - it would still work better than ParentPay's "product".

Let's talk specifics.

Every week results in intermittent, frequent down time. Their user experience design is truly Kafkaesque. Why does the lunch UI validation insist on the user choosing a main course first then the pudding on the same day, when selecting main courses then puddings or possibly skipping a pudding choice is a perfectly rational and desirable user behaviour? Who decided to invent their own UX style guidelines which needs a dictionary to decode, food icons that make no rational sense, a weekly calendar selection input that doesn't even look interactive unless you guess it is? No mobile app, which might be fine... on web, on both Android and iOS devices, the terrible UX (see above) doesn't degrade well and it throws up horizontal scrollbars on the screen, with UX elements which barely react to user manipulation. We've tried on several platforms, browsers and phones over the years and the fact remains - it's unusable on a mobile device. They also love interrupting the user logon journey to push payment settings changes (with no option to opt out at next login) despite knowing that my child is enrolled in a Scottish primary school where government funding kicks in across the age group (more wasted time Every. Single. Login.)

I've put up with ParentPay as a sub-standard product for 2 years now. After random timeouts on 11th Aug, I went to their complaints process and raised a formal complaint to the only comms channel accepted - an email address. If you email in, their inbox says it's an unmonitored email. Hunting around for an alternative customer service email and using it, plus asking for an update on Twitter, has resulted in silence.

It's no surprise.

Why would they reply to me as a parent when I'm not paying the platform invoice? As a parent user, it's easier just to ignore us. I wonder if they'll bother to engage (or actually improve their service) with poor social media PR instead? Looking at the other reviews, I don't have high hopes.

Do better, ParentPay. Start by responding to our email complaint on 11th August if you're serious about trying. Ticket reference 1012985.

I tried to put some money on for the second week back at school only to be faced with the child has been removed from the site and to contact the school if this has been done in error . Panicking now as child can't access school lunches , would have given 0 stars if I could . Absolutely useless system .

I would advise against it.I did not get back the money that was taken from my account which is not there for my daughters lunches. Awfull company that does not know maths.

I was happy that my call was answered very quickly and my query was given a thorough explanation of what was wrong.
This was then followed up by an email with all the information and even a link to a video to solve my problem.