Who needs to conduct Five-Day Meal count reconciliations?
Sponsoring Organizations are required to conduct five-day meal count reconciliations. However, it is a great idea or best practice for independent centers to do five-day meal count reconciliations as well.
when do they need to be conducted?
While doing your monitoring visits, you will need to look back at five consecutive days of all meal services for all meal types for that facility. The five days may be selected from the current or prior month.
Monitors should select five consecutive operating days, including weekends and holidays, when the day care home or center was open and serving meals.
The monitor may have to go back to previous weeks to obtain five consecutive operating days.
For each day examined, the monitor must use the enrollment and attendance records, except for outside-school-hours care centers, At-risk Afterschool programs, or emergency shelters where enrollment records are not required. For At-risk Afterschool and outside-school-hours care centers, a comparison of meal counts to attendance should be performed instead. Likewise, for emergency shelters a general review of how the shelter counts and claims meals should performed.
The monitor is going to determine the number of participants in care during each meal service and attempt to reconcile those numbers to the numbers of meals recorded for the facility’s meal count for that meal type.
Based on that comparison, monitors must determine whether the meal counts were accurate.
If there is a discrepancy between the number of meals documented for a meal type and the number of participants enrolled and in attendance, the monitor must attempt to reconcile the difference and determine whether the establishment of an overclaim is necessary.