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I’m the advancement chair for my troop. I’ve used scoutbook twice for Court of Honor (COH). I noticed a bug, and maybe its just me, but when I go to “Roster > Advancements > To Purchase” its the same list of scouts as “To Award” - which is pretty confusing.
I would only expect scouts to show up under “To Award” after I’ve created a PO to purchase their awards on the previous tab, under “To Purchase” - this is a really strange bug.
To make things even worse, after conducting COH I can’t just trust the “To Award” list of scouts to mark as “awarded” because of this bug - I have to specifically click on Scouts who have an open Purchase Order # (that I used for COH) to know which ones should be marked as awarded after COH. If you don’t pay careful attention to this, you could accidentally mark scouts who have not actually received their award as Awarded, and then they’ll just not receive their awards at the next COH.
Hopefully I’m just doing something wrong here and nobody else has this issue. Please help. Thanks. Ash
@AshB - this is not a bug as you can award items without a po especially if you have it on hand already. This IS NOT A BUG. If you are using the PO close the po before you award items as they get removed from an open po. For the CoH you should use the Scouts BSA recognition report.
If I close the PO the awarded items from the PO don’t get automatically removed. That’s part of the issue here.
Why is this not a bug? I didn’t flag the item as “I have it on hand” so why would the system assume I do and clone it to “To Award” ?
Or is there some place in ScoutBook I can tell it what my extra badges/patches are and then it can actually be smart enough to tell me “just award it, don’t buy this one”?
@AshB - DO NOT mark anything awarded if a PO is still open. And did you read the help page I linked. The PO is your shopping list and in some units they want the full po retained as part of their accounting.The process is items are approved then they move to the To Award and To Purchase at the very same time.. they are always going to match then the To Purchase get moved to a PO the PO is printed and the UAC goes to the shop once all items are purchased the PO is closed.
Hi, yes I’ve read the help page you linked to, and I’ve read your comments. Thanks for sharing that.
Unfortunately none of this addresses the issue I’ve raised, it’s just reaffirming the current process which seems to be broken and error prone. I’m sorry, but have you understood my concern?
Let me elaborate:
An award shouldn’t have two “states” at the same time, it should either be in “to purchase” OR “to award” - think of it like a grocery shopping list, an item must be purchased before you can unpack it from the bag. You can’t buy and unpack at the same time, right? Theres an order of operations and unless you have some reason to believe the milk is already in the bag, don’t ask me to unpack it (“to award”).
@AshB - the process as i have stated is working as designed and has been that way since the inception of scoutbook when privately owned. There is NO BUG. You need to work the process properly.
They will show up in both and will ALWAYS show up in both. That is done for instances where you want to award because you have the items already. Some units use the PO process as designed where items are bought and PO closed as documentation of money spent.
@AshB this is working correctly and as designed. Some units keep award inventory so do not need to purchase some things, that is why it is intentionally designed this way.
@Stephen_Hornak Yes, I’m sure it has always worked this way, but that’s beside the point.
@DonovanMcNeil The system should let me indicate if I already own an item before the item shows up under “to award” - it shouldn’t assume everything I need to purchase is also available to award. Does that make sense?
Let me give you a real world scenario: let’s assume we’ve ordered all the “to purchase” items on Monday via PO and ScoutShop and are planning to distribute on Friday at COH.
After COH concludes we close the PO (which does not automatically move the “to award” items from the PO to “Awarded”) so we have to select all the items that were awarded and click “Award items” individually. Now here’s the problem: if any scout awards were approved between Monday and Friday, those awards are now mixed in under “To Award” with all the items that were actually distributed at COH. If you are not careful you can easily mark an item under “To Award” as awarded, because COH is over and the assumption is all awards that were needing to be awarded have been awarded. In this situation a scout award can be mistakenly marked as “Awarded” even though the scout never received it.
In this scenario two bad things have happened:
A scout that earned an award will not actually receive it, because it won’t get ordered
ScoutShop loses revenue because items that are needed are not purchased
The very simple fix to this is to not automatically place all awards into both states (“to purchase” and “to award”) simultaneously.
This is a misunderstanding of the function of the status. “Needs Awarding” is not about whether it is on hand and “available” to award. “Needs Awarding” indicates that it has been earned, Approved and needs to be presented to the scout. This is independent of whether or not the item is ever purchased/available to award.
This is the first unit-side process issue in what you’re describing. The PO should be closed when the items on it are purchased, not after the COH has occurred. A PO is a “purchasing” document, not a “things to be awarded” document. Closing a PO should not move things to “Awarded” status, since it is only meant to track what needs to be bought or otherwise acquired (e.g. pulled from unit stock). As described previously, the process should be:
Mark items Approved (which adds them to any open PO).
Finalize the PO for purchasing at some date prior to the occurrence of COH. Close the PO at this time, which locks-in all of the items on the PO.
Purchase the items on the PO, or otherwise acquire them from unit stock (e.g. immediate recognition items in packs/dens).
Update the closed PO to remove any items that were unable to be purchased (e.g. out-of-stock) so that they will re-appear on the open PO for purchasing next time.
Use the Recognition Report to identify what is being awarded (and to note down what wasn’t available but has been earned).
Award things at CoH
Go to the Needs Awarding list and mark awarded only those things that have been awarded. If an individual item is marked awarded in error, go into that scout’s record and uncheck the Awarded status so it again appears on the Needs Awarding report.
This sounds like another process issue on the unit side. There should not be a blanket assumption that everything that needed awarding was awarded. It is not infrequent that one or more scouts in a unit will miss CoH due to some other commitment, being sick, etc. So, whoever is handling the actual distribution of the awards should always be careful when marking what has actually been distributed on the Needs Awarding list. This is no different from the potential for misuse of the “Approve All” feature that could result in Approval of items that have not actually been reviewed by the relevant scouter.
In fact, our advancement chair tracks what’s being handed out in real time on her list, then back-checks against what’s still in the bin after CoH to make sure she didn’t mis-mark something (or it didn’t fall out of the baggie by mistake), then transfers that verified data into SB marking off the Needs Awarding list.
Hi @CharleyHamilton , thanks for your helpful and detailed response. You are correct about when the PO should be closed and how items should be marked as ‘awarded’ post COH, but those are both unrelated to the point I was trying to make, which is specifically about award items showing up in two separate phases simultaneously for no obvious reason. I’ll illustrate with some information from SBP below.
When looking at the Roster > Advancements page, the award phases (tabs) are listed in a specific order (and you might be right this is a misunderstanding of the meaning of the “To Award” phase), here is what’s present:
To Record > To Approve > To Purchase > To Award > Awarded > History.
It is not obvious why an item would automatically be placed in multiple phases simultaneously, both “To Purchase” and “To Award” here. I understand that units can have extra items in stock that they may not want to purchase, but the system shouldn’t assume that is the case for every item and automatically place the award in both phases simultaneously without any input from the user. Again, this causes confusion when looking at “To Award” because it mixes in awards that may not exist in this phase.
I’m all for there being built-in support for using items from stock in SBP, but perhaps that can be made as a more explicit action by the user (maybe I can tell SBP what my extra/stock items are before an item moves from To Purchase to To Award) instead of the items showing up in two phases like this. Hope that made sense.
The phases are non-exclusive sets in the real world, though. Some but not all things that need to be awarded also need to be purchased (i.e. all of those not already in the unit’s possession). Everything that needs to be purchased also needs to be awarded (why purchase an award that you’re not going to hand out?). Speaking mathematically, everything in “Needs Purchasing” is a subset of “Needs Awarding”. Just because it can’t physically be handed to the scout right this minute doesn’t mean it doesn’t still need to be awarded. Just because I haven’t gotten my paycheck yet doesn’t mean my bill isn’t due. The money (award) is in both the “Needs Acquiring” (“Needs Purchasing”) and “Needs Spending” (“Needs Awarding”) states at the same time.
It seems like the non-exclusivity of the states is where the discussion is breaking down. You appear to view the states as exclusive, in that the item must have been purchased or otherwise already obtained in order to transition to “Needs Awarding” as a new state of existence. This would create a situation where something would have to be marked as purchased (i.e. PO closed) in order for anything to appear on the Needs Awarding list. However, in particular for immediate recognition items, the program intent is not for units to have to go out and purchase those items in order to award them. However, your proposed algorithm would require all items to pass into and back out of the “Needs Purchasing” state in order to reach the “Needs Awarding” state. Thus, the Den Leader (for example) could not present the adventure loop to their cubs because they wouldn’t know it needed awarding until after the person on the committee side (e.g. UAC) had transitioned that item from the “Needs Purchasing” state to the “Needs Awarding” state. This would defeat the purpose of the immediate recognition part of the program.
Given the comments from the SUAC folks, the design intent is not for the states to be exclusive. That is consistent with the actual physical world state of the items, at least in my opinion. An item need not exist in the possession of the unit in order to need to be awarded, just to actually get awarded. I don’t know that it’s going to get any traction with the developers to make a change that would introduce additional liminal states for awards or tracking of what is already in a unit’s stock.
I’m closing this thread because it has run its course.
As has been stated the purpose of To Award is to indicate the Scout has physically been presented the award. It is not tied to a purchase order because buying the award and presenting to the Scout are independent actions (some units have stock on hand)
The system is working as designed. Scouting America IT has no plans to make changes in this area.
