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.
Now I feel bad about following up on my email from about 2 weeks ago. In the past it was always super fast, so I assumed when I hadn’t heard back in a week that something had gone awry. Now that I know, I’ll just be patient, it’s not really a rush anyway, it’s just one more thing I can cross off the list this busy time of year.
Our pack is having a sign up night next week and my plan was to have parents sign up online, the school has wifi and they can use their phones I might bring a laptop/ipad or two. I had planned to turn off payments on our pin because the pack is going to collect dues soon anyway. I thought it’d be simpler for new families to just have to pay our pack dues which include the fee for next year.
This is my first year as CM, so I’m not sure how this works. If they signup online, but don’t pay online, then our pack is charged by council the pro-rated amount for them from Sep-Dec? I want to make sure everyone gets in quickly, so it sounds like I should keep the registration fee online? I guess we could just tell new families the online fee is for now to the end of the year, and the dues the pack will collect are for all of next year?
That is correct, someone has to pay National the $11 (4/12 of $33) before their registration goes anywhere. Your council may allow you to send a. Email to take it out of your UDA, or you may have to handle it in person. You may want to check with them.
There are a number of setup and use options for online registration. I suggest contacting your council.
My understanding is that new adult members to a unit who are not already registered are charged to the end of the unit charter year (which might not be the calendar year).
I wouldn’t feel bad. I thought something had gone wrong with the ticketing system as well. I pinged them 4 or 5 times and then called the 800 # because my issue was an Adult Leader was disconnected from everything in Scoutbook; the Pack, their Den, even their own kids! And we need that working during recruiting season so that we don’t lose parents. The issue was escalated and literally handled in 30 seconds. I just think they are woefully undermanned at the moment and in the middle of training additional reps.
We would love to utilize the online sign-up to eliminate paper, but I’m not sure that the workflow is all that well thought through. Our Council sign-up fee for the next 4 months is $18 (not $11) and we don’t keep that kind of money in our Unit Account. Our dues also cover the 2020 BSA dues and we think the 2 parts are confusing. I wish BSA would charge by the school year, so parents could just pay the full BSA amount now and our dues would look smaller in comparison. Most parents don’t understand that 2/3 of the dues go right back out again…
When the council registrar enters the scout application Scoutbook updates it in the Scoutbook system in the next batch processing. As a commissioner, I am recommending to units to not set up Scoutbook accounts for new scouts or leaders. One reason is that you know that the scout or adult is actually registered. Second, you do not have errors of what a unit administrator entered versus how the scout is officially registered and should not have to update or delete duplicates. If the council does not get the application processed timely (how about a week from the time you turn it in at the council office) then call your District Executive to follow up.
Units using on-line scout registration tell me that the new scouts are showing up in Scoutbook the next day. Please consider on-line registration to save input for council and the unit.
One of the things that becomes an issue with Parents are the Lion Partners and Tiger Adults. These parents receive BSA MemberIDs and are entered into Akela, however if you create them in Scoutbook before they are in Akela, you will then need to have them merged. Unfortunately, the best thing is to wait until the Scout’s membership is processed and appears in SB and then pull the parent over from Akela… the drawback to this is with a paper application that can take quite some time to process.
