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.
So we have a large number of scouts that are transferring into our council from elsewhere (military base, so lots of moves). Council is populating the scouts but they all receive new BSA numbers. So now my scout for example has a blank history.
What’s the best way to correct all of these? Is our council doing something wrong, or is this just a fact of the software when transferring?
For example, my kid: Zachary, TAC council BSA # where his history is:135570424
New FEC council with zero history: 137481973
However, to reduce the odds of a duplicate Scoutbook account in the future, update their Edit Profile page in Scoutbook so that all their information (especially full name, date of birth, address (including city, state, and zip code), district, and council all match exactly with the information that is on their BSA youth application. Also go ahead and update their Membership page in Scoutbook. In most cases, the new BSA member number will overwrite the old one in Scoutbook and a duplicate Scoutbook account will not be created.
Edited to add: The information in Scoutbook (Edit Profile and Membership pages) should be updated before the BSA youth application is submitted (paper or online). When the information doesn’t match, the computer system thinks that they are different people and creates a new Scoutbook account for them.
It’s actually an artefact of the pre-existing BSA systems, which required that separate “blocks” of BSA IDs be assigned to different councils. It’s a hold-over from the pre-internet days when they had to manually ensure that different people couldn’t be given the same BSA ID by different councils.
As a result, a transfer from one council to another means a new BSA ID. However, as @JenniferOlinger noted, there are ways to minimize the chances of a duplicate Scoutbook account being created.
@GregoryZimmerman I have merged Z’s Scoutbook accounts. If you are currently logged in to Scoutbook, you might need to log out, and then back in again.
