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.
We’ve been a longtime Troopmaster user but are starting the switch over to Scoutbook, since we’re essentially doing double work that we’d like to eliminate.
I’ve been going into Scoutbook and entering past events (campouts, hiking, service projects, courts of honor, etc.) on the Scoutbook calendar, and entering the attendance at those events. I’ve gone back so far to 2017 entering those events on the SB calendar.
What I’m finding is that when I go to run the Activity Log reports, either for the entire troop or just for one individual, it does not show any of the camping nights or service hours, based on the activity I’ve entered.
Am I doing something wrong? Even those events that have taken place recently, those that we have participated in since we started using SB all the time, they don’t show camping nights or service hours. I can see myself and a few of the other adults in the troop when I run the troop Activity Log, but for the most part, none of the Scouts in our troop say they have any camping nights or service hours since they joined Scouts BSA.
Unfortunately, the logs are a separate item from the calendar, and do not currently have any kind of import process.
However, if you want to import to the calendar the Feature Assistant Extension for Chrome and Firefox can import a csv file. That said, I don’t think it can import attendance data.
So should I just use the SB calendar for our Scribe to record troop meeting attendance, and not even bother entering other activities on the SB calendar (we use SOAR for our Troop website, so the calendar that families refer to is the one on there, and not SB), since I’ll just have to create activities in IA, anyways, to record the attendance at campouts and service projects?
Just want to try and not have to enter the same data in a half dozen places.
Generally, we have only used the Scoutbook calendar attendance to track things like meetings and anything not explicitly covered in the logs. We’ve been using the logs to track camping, hiking and service hours.
Note that the logs do not associate to advancement requirements automatically, so there’s still a need for manual tracking in that regard. Generally, I’ll use the notes field for tracking which events (e.g. campouts) counted toward which requirements when I’m signing things off.
We use the calendar as our calendar. So, every activity and meeting goes on it. We only track attendance on campouts and other activities that have a fee. Those that are marked in attendance are used by our treasurer to charge their accounts and by our advancement coordinator to enter nights camped / miles hiked / service hours served.
