Another thing to consider: a Scout can be a member of more than one unit (pack, troop, etc.) in the same program at the same time.
So this goes back to the question of what do users want to do with the information? If the idea is to use it for service stars, then this can get messy very quickly.
Some really great input here from @Bill_W @edavignon @CharleyHamilton @JenniferOlinger the past day. Thank you for the thoughts on the issue.
I spent most of the evening looking at one scout. Please let me know if I understand correctly and if this is how Scoutbook works:
Based on the take over date, if a unit was not using Scoutbook, then this is the reason past membership data starts at 1/1/2018. Now from the interface it appears I can open up a past membership and edit the start and end dates.
Question: If I can edit the start date from 1/1/2018 to the actual date that they started in scouts, this should in theory update the total number of days in that membership?
Since Scoutbook allows editing of the dates in a current membership, as evidence, from the attached upload,
Am I making sense or am I completely off target?
I was confused by what you were describing here so I went and looked at scouts in my troop and took some screen shots. Iâm not sure exactly what the issue is since I can see the total days of membership within my troop on the Scoutâs Membership page.
What I see when I look my scouts, is a list of past and current memberships, plus a tally that totals all of the memberships. From these items I can determine the tenure of each scout in my troop for: their time in the troop as a whole and their time in whatever patrols they have been assigned to.
For this scout, he was not a Cub Scout and joined as soon as he was eligible age wise. His membership in the unit itself started on 3/17/21. When he was finally moved into the Snake Patrol on 5/19/21, it did change his unit membership to the past membership column and set his membership in the Patrol as his current membership.
This didnât actually end his membership in my troop. You can see from the total listed next to Tenure, that it has added up all of the days listed under the current and past membership categories.
It seems like a counterintuitive way of tracking unit membership, but hereâs how I understand it.
When he first joined, he membership was with the unit at large only and he was not in a Patrol group membership.Then, when I moved him into a Patrol, doing so DID NOT actually end his membership in the unit even though the membership for the troop shows an end date of 5/19/21. The current membership simply reflects that as a member of my troop, he is now part of the Snake Patrol and not just floating around in Troop ####B patrol-less.
Membership in a Patrol is still membership in the Troop and his total tenure in my troop is reflected in the 154 Days that is listed next to Tenure.
Hereâs another Scout who has been in the troop for 5 years. We had to reorganize our patrols this year and that is reflected by what is listed under Past and Current Memberships. However, if you look at his total Tenure, it accurately reflects the 5 years heâs been in the troop (1976 days) and not just the length of time in his current Patrol.
If itâs adults youâre worried about, hereâs me. The main difference is that there is no tally of all my roles, just the tenure of the individual positions.
I have been a Troop Admin for longer than Iâve been a Scoutmaster and that is reflected in the position totals. To get an accurate time of my service to the troop, Iâd subtract my Scoutmaster days from the Troop Admin days to get my total membership time. However, when I started as Troop Admin I wasnât actually registered, so if I want to have my official registered position tenure, Iâd use the Scoutmaster total alone.
I am also a registered leader in a Cub Scout pack, but those totals are obviously not included in my Troop profile since itâs a different unit.
S.G.
Thanks, you are seeing what I am seeing. Let me try using the same terminology from Scoutbook.
All of our scouts had unassigned patrols. Since we are trying to transition to only use Scoutbook, we wanted to set up and assign patrols. So All I want to do is add them the patrol without affecting the current membership. Does it make sense that if Scoutbook lets you alter the existing membership start and end dates, you could add a patrol if one is not assigned without creating a new membership so you can show, correctly what patrol the scout has always been in?
All membership in Scoutbook for Packs and Troops is created with the assigned sub-unit (or none). There is no way to change the assigned sub-unit other than ending one membership and creating a new one.
Member Update, the process that imports Scouts from Akela to Scoutbook, always assigns the Scout to no sub-unit because Akela does not track sub-units. This is why all Scouts come into the unit not in a den or patrol.
Because the membership is tied to the sub-unit, when you move a Scout to a new sub-unit, the current membership ends and a new one is created. Without substantial rewrite, this canât be changed.
If you want the patrol memberships to reflect the actual dates, as you have found, you can edit the start/end dates on each membership. Set the no-patrol membership to end on the start date then change the start date of the patrol membership to the actual start date.
I agree, I think for now, that is the workaround I will use. I will certainly make sure that no new scouts are not entered without a Patrol assigned or one is assigned very quickly after joining.
Off topic, Does anyone know where to go to update your email address that the forum uses? All of the other scouting sites are up to date, but the forums is using an old one.
If you look at the two scouts I took screenshots of, one came into the troop and was without a patrol for 2 months (past membership with just the unit, and current with his patrol), and the other was placed into a patrol right away but them moved to a new patrol this year (past membership shows old patrol, current shows new patrol).
Iâm only pointing that out so you can see how it looks when a scout comes in and is not immediately assigned a patrol and how it looks when he is.
I see what you are saying though - that essentially, the current membership should show two entries: one for the Troop Membership as a whole and one for the current Patrol.
I donât think the BSA is going to change how this is reported anytime soon. In my experience with my troop, we havenât had a need to have a separate listing for the general troop membership dates since the information is already there if we want it.
Itâs easy enough to refer to the total tenure listed at the top right to calculate how long the scout has been in the troop. The actual unit start date is listed in a few places (under past memberships; in the scoutâs profile) so that info is readily available as well. If you must have all the dates line up when displayed in Scoutbook, then futzing with the start/end dates is probably your best bet.
I donât know how large your Troop is, but if itâs smaller like mine (I have 18 scouts), you could make your own spreadsheet and calculate/track this for your members. Itâs some extra work but youâll have the info handy and itâs easy to update once you create the spreadsheet.
Google has a formula to calculate a date range that can be expressed in total days, months, years (SHEETS DATE FORMULA). Excel does as well (EXCEL DATE FORMULA).
That actually only works if theyâve only ever been in your unit. The total tenure includes all prior units (including both the Cub Scout and Scouts BSA programs), which is kinda what makes things complicated in the general case.
I agree that in principle all of this (advancement included) is trackable externally to Scoutbook. The value (at least in my mind) of tracking tenure-by-program in Scoutbook is that it can ultimately feed into the tracking of service awards in Scoutbook, which while not âmainlineâ awards are still nationally-recognized awards for scouts.
I just looked at my son who was in Cub Scouts starting with Tiger and is now a Life Scout.
On his BSA Membership page it shows me 3 sets of dates:
⢠Current Membership = 542 Days
⢠Past Membership = 1036 Days
⢠Total Tenure = 1578 Days (4.3 years)
The 1578 Days is only counting his time in the Troop, itâs not including his time in Cub Scouts.
But looking at other scouts, it appears that the scouts in my troop who crossed over from Cub Scouts in March 2018 all have their Cub Scout memberships included whereas all of my Scouts that crossed over to the troop before that only show their BSA memberships.
Still, even though itâs an inconvenience, the information is all there to calculate only the Scouts BSA membership tenure whether by using a spreadsheet or pencil and paper.
Yeah, my son shows all of his BSA tenure, whether with a troop or the pack together in one number.
We all agree that the data is there if you want to calculate tenure in a given unit âmanuallyâ (assuming that someone enters all of the relevant membership data), and in theory the information needed to determine tenure in each program is visible in the same place. The suggestion regarding explicitly calculating and displaying it within Scoutbook was intended to minimize the amount of âextra-Scoutbookâ calculation/tracking that needs to be done for the purposes of determining eligibility for awards.
I still donât see a lot of use personally for tracking tenure within a single unit, so Iâm less concerned myself about having an easy way to track that. Once @edavignon noted that it might be feasible, I started thinking about how I would code it (and therefore tracking individual program tenure) in a general sense. The closer we can get to defining exactly how we (as users) want to track/define/calculate something, the easier I think it would be to explain to the developers â who may or may not have any idea what itâs ultimately used (or useful) for.
I agree that the concept would be nice to implement because I can see the value in being able to see the total time as a member in the different BSA unit types. I donât think most of us want to add to our pile of things to do so that we can make workarounds to compile data that isnât conveniently available in Scoutbook.
Perhaps rather than reconfiguring how Scoutbook displays the information, would it be easier to have a report option that can be run which lists the various general BSA Branches (Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA, Explorers, Venture Scouts) with their start date (if applicable), end date (if applicable), membership years-months-days to date, and total membership tenure (years-months-days) calculated from the entered start & end dates?
Basically, create a report that would mimic the same info weâd have to manually create a spreadsheet to track? The info is already there, itâs just not displayed in a convenient manner.
You can already kinda do this from the Roster Builder, but only for the program in which you have a leader relationship with the scout. If you use the < Program Name > History Report, it will return the start date (but no end dates) for the programs except Cub Scouting, based on the values manually entered in âDate Joined Scouts BSAâ, âDate Joined Venturingâ, âDate Joined Sea Scoutingâ. If any of those profile dates are left blank, then the date isnât reported anywhere. Unless people use the OA Eligibility report in Scoutbook (which relies in part on that date and notifies you if itâs blank), then most folks donât realize that parameter is even there, so it stays blank.
This is true. I make sure the scouts in my troop have their start date entered into their profile for the OA Eligibility Report but the Pack I am a leader in does not use Scoutbook for much. I am the only leader that ever enters anything in there for activities, health form dates, etc.
The only negative with the reports though is it doesnât give you any cumulative totals.
I can see my sonsâ start dates in the report, but it doesnât tell me how many days theyâve been members in Scouts BSA nor does it list start/end dates for their tenure in Cub Scouts or how many days there were members in the Pack.
Actually, I donât even see a place in the profile for my son that is a Cub Scout to enter his start date.
OA eligibility doesnât require a specific Scouts BSA tenure. Camping requirements and First class only, no?
We were talking about using the report to gather some of the information that the OP was looking for, not the requirements to be eligible for OA itself.
The OA Eligibility Report is an easy way to see troop membership start dates (if theyâve been entered into a scoutâs profile), current rank, and short/long term camping nights.
True but it does require that the camping be since joining a troop, crew or ship (depending on who is electing you) so Cub Scout camping would not count for this purpose.
I always thought the number of days related to that particular assignment (den, patrol, for adults - position, etc.) I never thought of it as overall tenure in scouting.
My observations are that the following may also cause resets:
My observation is that using a system for something it is not designed to
The national membership database and Scoutbook are designed to do different things. Advancement and awards do not have the same requirements and may be counted differently.
The national membership database is designed for registering memberships (unit and non-unit). The membership data and number of units may not be usable for Journey to Excellence for the first half of the year due to overlapping data and delays in rechartering.
Units may meet during the school year only, but for service star tenure a whole year is counted.
Units formed for Scouting groups visiting from other countries in BSA and units formed for World Jamborees and Rover Moots are special cases and usually not counted for tenure.
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