Food pantries & distributions · South Florida
A food pantry sign-up system that also writes your report.
If your team rebuilds the “people served” number by hand at the end of every month, that is the part worth fixing first — and fixing it also fixes the queue, the duplicates and the no-shows.
Registration, check-in and reporting are one job.
Most pantries solve them separately: a form somewhere, a clipboard at the table, a spreadsheet at month end. Each handoff is where the work and the errors live. Connect them and the third one disappears entirely, because the report is just the sum of what the volunteers already marked.
This is running now at a Boca Raton church, monthly, and the whole workflow is written up step by step, including what it replaced.
The phone number is what makes a limit enforceable.
Names cannot carry it. The same person appears as Yelena, Elena and Olena across three sheets, addresses change, and nobody wants to accuse a neighbour of signing up twice. A mobile number confirmed by SMS is the one thing a household reliably has one of, so "once a month" becomes a setting instead of an argument.
- One confirmed number, one registration — refused while someone is signing up, long before the table
- Once per month, or whatever period you decide
- Capacity per date, closing registration automatically when it is reached
- A waiting list, if you want one, so a full date still offers a next step
Your rules may be different: some pantries serve anyone who arrives, every week, by policy. What matters is that the rule is yours, written down once, and then held by the system instead of by whoever is on the door that morning.
What actually happens on distribution day.
A volunteer signs in by email or PIN on their own phone, opens the scanning screen and points it at the family's code. The phone vibrates, the handout is marked, and the next family steps forward. No scanner to buy, no tablet to charge.
When the camera will not cooperate — sun, cracked screen, a printed code folded four times — the volunteer types the six digits. When the hall's connection dies, you hand out against the printed list and reconcile afterwards. Both fallbacks are built in at setup, because the queue cannot wait for your Wi-Fi.
Decide what “people served” means before a funder asks.
Unique individuals, households, or visits are three different numbers from the same marks, and a grant report that quietly changes definition between years is a problem you only discover under questioning. Settle it at setup, record it with the data, and the export stops being a monthly reconstruction.
What you get is a running count available the moment the last family leaves, a breakdown by date, and an Excel file in the shape your funder asks for. A grant application that needs those same records draws on the same data.
What it takes to start.
From $450 one-time, or $75 a month if you want it supported and kept current, ready in one to two weeks. For the first three organizations, we set this up at no cost in exchange for a written reference, permission to publish the case, and two introductions.
Bring three things to a twenty-minute call: how people sign up today, how many places you have per date, and the two situations your volunteers find hardest. We work from Boca Raton with pantries, churches and community programs across Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, and the same setup handles a free meal, a clothing give-away or a back-to-school event.
Questions before you start.
Do families need a smartphone?
They need a phone that receives SMS. The six-digit PIN works without a camera or a data connection, and a volunteer can register someone at the table on their behalf if you allow it.
Does this work in Russian or Ukrainian?
Yes. The pages the families read can run in Russian, Ukrainian and English, and a translator checks every line of them. There is more about that here.
Can we keep taking walk-ins?
Yes. Registration is there to make the known queue predictable, and anyone who turns up without it can be recorded on the day and counted in the same report.
Who can see a family's details?
Only the roles you grant. A scanning volunteer sees what they need to hand out food and nothing else; care notes and sensitive requests are restricted separately.
What if we already report through a partner agency?
The Excel export is built to match the fields you already submit. If your partner agency needs a particular format, bring a blank copy of it to the first call.
Twenty minutes, free. If a spreadsheet is genuinely enough for your size, we'll tell you that.