CACFP meal counting and claims for daycares

The idea

Daycares on CACFP get reimbursed 1-4 USD per meal served, which for a 60-child centre is serious money. The catch: counts must be taken at point of service, per child, per meal, and a state audit that finds reconstructed tallies disallows the claims and can claw back months of reimbursement. Today this runs on paper clipboards and a director’s Sunday-night arithmetic.

KidKare, the incumbent, is dated and widely disliked, and it carries two decades of home-provider baggage. The wedge is a clean tablet screen a teacher can tap during actual meal service, hard count-locking with an audit trail, and a monthly claim that cross-checks itself against enrolment and attendance before the state does.

Who pays

The buyer is the centre director or owner, at 29-59 USD/month tiered by enrolment - easily justified when one disallowed month of claims costs thousands. Distribution: CACFP sponsor organisations that oversee dozens of centres and want their sites audit-clean, state CACFP training events, and daycare director groups.

MVP scope

• Classroom rosters with enrolment dates and income eligibility categories
• Tap-to-count point-of-service screen per meal service, tablet-first
• End-of-day count locking with reasoned edits and a full audit trail
• Monthly claim aggregation with discrepancy flags, PDF and CSV output
• Skip for v1: menu planning and meal-pattern compliance, home provider mode, sponsor multi-centre dashboards, state e-filing integrations

Build MealCount, a web app for daycare centres on the Child and Adult Care
Food Program (CACFP) to record point-of-service meal counts and produce the
monthly claim. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase for Postgres, auth, and
row-level security separating centres, and server-side PDF generation with
react-pdf.

Setup: director creates classrooms, enrols children with enrolment date and
income eligibility category (free, reduced, paid), and configures which meal
services the centre claims (breakfast, AM snack, lunch, PM snack, supper).

Daily flow: a tablet in each classroom shows the roster for the current meal
service. The teacher taps each child present and eating as the meal is
served - point-of-service, not reconstructed later. Counts lock at the end
of each service day; edits after lock require a reason and are stored in an
audit trail, because that is exactly what state auditors examine.

Monthly claim: the app aggregates meals served by type and eligibility
category, applies attendance and enrolment cross-checks (a claimed meal for
a child not enrolled that day gets flagged, days claimed cannot exceed days
attended), and outputs a claim summary PDF laid out to match common state
claim forms, plus a CSV.

Pages: today's meal service per classroom, enrolment management, monthly
claim review with flagged discrepancies, audit log, settings. Pricing:
tiered by enrolment - 29 USD/month up to 50 children, 59 USD/month above.