Does Laevo replace my state or food-bank reporting?

Short answer: no, and be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. Laevo counts the households, individuals, and age bands your programme asks for, from the visits your volunteers already logged. It does not file your TEFAP return, it does not post to Oasis Insight, and it does not submit anything to Link2Feed or a state portal on its own. Nobody outside those systems can, because none of them publish a way in for other software. A vendor claiming a live integration with your state's portal is either doing something unusual and worth asking hard questions about, or overselling.

What Laevo actually does

Every visit a volunteer records — a household, a size, whether it was a first visit, an age breakdown — becomes part of a running total. The Reports screen turns that into the exact figures a programme preset asks for: TEFAP, CSFP, a state or county form, a food bank partner report, or a grant application. You can see the number, see every visit behind it, and download it as a plain CSV built to be pasted straight into whatever form or portal your programme actually uses.

When double entry is the honest answer

If your regional food bank requires every pantry in its network to log visits directly in Oasis Insight or Link2Feed — some networks do, especially where several agencies need to see a shared client record — that requirement does not go away because you also use Laevo. In that case you are choosing between using Laevo alongside the mandated system for the things it does better day to day (the shelf, the rota, dignity at the window), or staying on the mandated system alone to avoid entering anything twice.

• If your food bank's system is only checked at reporting time and visit-by-visit entry there is optional, Laevo plus a monthly paste-in is usually less total typing than using their system for daily tracking.
• If your food bank's system requires real-time entry — because agencies share client records across the network — running both is more work, not less, and staying on their system alone is the right call.
• Ask your food bank directly: "is agency-level entry required at every visit, or only totals at reporting time?" That one question decides this for you.

What we would do instead of promising an integration

We could have called the CSV export a "state reporting integration" and let the phrase do work it hasn't earned. We are not going to, because the pantry that believes it and stops keeping its own copy of what it filed is the pantry that has a bad afternoon when an auditor asks. The report you keep in Laevo — the numbers, the date, who ran it — is your own record of what you filed and when, independent of whatever the state's own system shows.

If Laevo ever does build a direct connection to a specific state's system or to Oasis Insight or Link2Feed, it will be because that system published a real way in, and this guide will say so by name. Until then, the honest description is: Laevo does the counting, you do the filing, and the gap between those two is one CSV, not zero.

What to actually check before you switch anything

Before you move a pantry's day-to-day tracking into Laevo, get three answers in writing from whoever holds your funding or your agency agreement: which figures they require, on what schedule, and whether their own system requires visit-level entry from you or only a periodic total. Those three answers tell you exactly where Laevo fits — as your only record, or as the place you track the daily work while the mandated system stays the system of record for reporting.

Either way, keep your own copy of what you filed. A dated CSV sitting in your own files, separate from any portal you do not control the uptime or the account history of, is the kind of boring habit that saves a genuinely bad afternoon when someone asks what you reported eighteen months ago and the portal has since changed hands or reset its history.