Attendance taking unusable

The attendee list needs to be grouped by sub-unit (patrol/den) and sorted in order for attendance taking to be usable in the app. Currently, all adults and scouts are in a mixed list, sorted by database id, making it an unusable tool.

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The developers are aware and will be fixing this. I do not know when, though.

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We have never had a problem using it. It would be nice to be grouped by den/patrol or so. I would not call it “unusable” because we use it just fine.

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You must not have over 225 people in your list. It is absolutely unusable.

Wow! That’s a problem [ emphasis added in quote] I’d love to have. I occasionally see how it’s a hassle getting attendance logged, even in our much smaller (70+/- scouts) unit. Do y’all log the parents, too, or is that just scouts and registered leaders?

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Joe, it sounds like what you mean is “it is unusable for you” – it’s not unusable for me and lots of other units.

Just out of curiosity, what’s wrong with the default sort order? It works fine for everyone else that I talk to. Ours is sorted in alpha order by first name.

Have you considered using your own attendance method instead? Maybe a spreadsheet or print out a hard copy of the roster?

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Note that this is the “Scouting Mobile App” forum. I am NOT talking about Scoutbook.

In the app, the sort is by database ID, which is effectively a measure of how long you’ve had your scoutbook account. Scouts, parents, and leaders are all mixed together, non- alphabetically.

I challenge you to find a single person who finds this usable for a 70+ scout unit, which ends up have 200+ people in the arbitrarily sorted list.

The Scouting Mobile App enables scouts to take attendance, but we cannot use it because there is no patrol grouping or even an alphabetical sort.

This should be trivial to fix, and it would make the Scouting Mobile App into a “must have” tool for youth leadership.

This ONE issue is preventing adoption of the App in our troop. It also prevents us from using Scoutbook for attendance tracking in general. All of that time the developers spent making attendance reports was wasted, because the youth leaders can’t even get attendance data into the system.

Part of the reason that I asked about who-all was included in your attendance is that we don’t generally invite (or, therefore take attendance) of the parents at troop meetings. Parents show up (or don’t) at the meetings, but receive the invitation notice based on their scout being invited to the meeting.

I haven’t gotten a complaint from our scribe about the app, but I guess if it’s causing this much heartburn for y’all, it’s probably worth reaching out to see if he’s having trouble, too, and just hasn’t said anything.

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I just log in through the browser on my phone and it’s done.

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I think that @JoeMcKinley is aiming to have the scouts use the intended functionality of the Scouting app (which allows certain youth to take attendance through the app), rather than having an adult leader log in and allow the youth to take attendance from the leader’s login.

I agree with the goal of getting this fixed in the app, and it seems like it’s at least on the developers’ list now. I’m not sure if this is “easy” or “Dilbert easy”TM, though, since I haven’t seen how it was coded to begin with. It does seem like the actual coding of the sort isn’t difficult, but the existence of a workaround (having the scout take attendance via a leader’s login) might push it down the priority queue behind things that don’t have a workaround at all. I don’t know how the BSA is making decisions as to which fruit are ripe for picking and which stay on the tree longer.

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Scouts cannot take attendance through Scoutbook. Only adults can.

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Scouts can take attendance directly in Scoutbook as well, can’t they? I know my son did when he was the Troop Scribe.

Scouts can take Attendance in the Scouting App

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Scouts cannot take attendance via the Scoutbook website. The workaround that some units have used is to create an account with limited permissions but can edit the calendar. This ID is then shared with the scout who needs to take attendance.

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Yep. We’re set up like that. I thought he was using his own ID for attendance. Must have been using the Webmaster ID.

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