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CACFP stands for Child and Adult Care Food Program. It is a federally-funded, state-administered program to improve the nutrition of the people of the state of Indiana. Under this program, daycare providers can receive reimbursement for the meals they serve. While CACFP is available to everyone, it is structured so that lower income families needing daycare services receive more of a break.

The Agency asked me to observe their CACFP claiming process for 70 some home providers to see if anything could be done to automate it. This is a primarily manual process that takes seven days each month to get out a monthly claim. Each provider submits various forms to the Agency each month:

• the monthly menu which is a list of all meals served.
  
  Each of these must be checked against CACFP nutritional standards and allowed or disallowed.
  
  
• the enrollment roster for the month
• the meal attendance or participation sheets
  
  If child is being claimed on the attendance sheet, then their name must be included on the enrollment roster. Agency Staff do this cross checking. They also must check any meal for which the Provider is claiming over capacity. This is quite an involved task, described in the following paragraph.
  
  The Provider can serve more meals than their license capacity – they just can’t serve (and claim) more meals than their license capacity at the same time. They are allowed up to 3 school age children in addition to their license capacity – plus relatives and their own children are not included in this license number. So Agency staff must go back to the enrollment sheet, mark the school age children, and then mark them on the participation sheet. If the number being claimed falls within the number allowed by the license plus 2 or 3 school age children, then the Provider is not over-claiming. If the number being claimed exceeds the number allowed by the license plus 2 or 3 school age children, then Agency Staff must scan the time-in and time-out for each child. If the maximum served at any one time falls within the number allowed by the license plus 2 or 3 school age children, then the Provider is not over claiming.
  
  
• Whether the Provider is Tier One or Mixed Tier and their reimbursement rate.

The claim information eventually ends up in an Excel Spreadsheet which is used to enter the claim on the CACFP website.

My recommendation and cost benefit analysis for automating this system.