Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
@edavignon But to confirm, the fact that a den is “unapproved” has absolutely no impact on the Scouts inside of it. I want to make sure I am using the tools correctly. So what I should do is:
Create an “Inactive” Den
Make the Den “Unapproved”
Place “Inactive” Scouts in the Inactive Den
Make the Scouts “Unapproved”
When all of the Unapproved Scouts in the Unapproved Den are removed from the official roster, the Scouts and the Den will disappear.
Other than having Unapproved Dens disappear when they have no members, do they serve any other purpose?
Why would you want the den to go away? The inactive scouts drop off at recharter. But during the processing time, you may have more inactive scouts. If your inactive scout den has disappeared, now you have to create a new inactive scout den.
We have a standard den for this issue, Webelos Den 99 Inactive Scouts. When a scout stops attending, we can move them to this den. It’s always there, available as needed.
I don’t necessarily want the Den to go away, but I wanted to map out the “correct” way of doing this. Ideally, I’d like to see this whole “Approved/Unapproved” changed to “Active/Inactive”. And when a Scout becomes “Inactive” they can be moved to an “Inactive” list by Scoutbook. I really think that the “Approved/Unapproved” confuses a lot of people, especially those that don’t know the history of the subscription service.
Side note: What I find interesting is that the count of Scouts in a Den only counts the Scouts that are “Approved”. This can also be confusing when you have a Den with zero Scouts, and then you open it up to find more… or if you don’t have an Inactive Den and the Scouts are still in their original Den, the numbers are just off.
