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.
Our scout troop wants to transition form TroopMaster to Scoutbook. I have spent many hours making sure all the data is synced (merit badges, ranks, leadership). Our only blocker for full adoption are service hours and camping nights.
I am a competent Python programmer. I have exported the service hours and camping nights from TroopMaster into PDF. I wrote a custom Python program to convert the data to CSV.
Is there any way that I can import this data in bulk into IA? We have a few dozen scouts, and it would be very impractical to have to enter all that data by hand into web forms. In fact I consider it a blocker for adoption. I can convert this data into any format that is needed.
Moving forward, we would input the data into IA instead of TroopMaster. We just have to change our workflow, that part is easy. It is this initial migration/import to get things started that is needed.
I converted our Troop over from TM to SB last fall. I have no programming abilities and everything was moved “manually”. We have more than 65 scouts. It was excruciating. Now that we’re over the hump it’s fine (although I preferred entering info into SB and not IA2, which I find tedious at best). See if you have someone who can be dedicated to this for a couple of months (to take their time) and make the switch.
a few years ago when I switched a troop from TM to SB - I made mass entries per scout - 68 camping nights on this one date, 150 service hours on this one date - the data was still there - I did break up camping enough for the OA report to work
One thing that might help you is that you don’t need to enter the numbers for each Scout in an individual transaction. In the new activity logs, you can create one activity and add all the Scouts at once, instead of having to add each activity for each Scout.
In other words, you can create “Summer Camp 2019” once, then add all the Scouts that attended, instead of adding “Adam: Summer Camp 2019, Bert: Summer Camp 2019, Charlie: Summer Camp 2019” etc…
You could probably start with the calendar with the activities, make the list of Scouts at each one, and then plough through it. It may not be as onerous as expected.
My troop is also migrating to Scoutbook from Troopmaster. I’m a new advancement coordinator, so I am trying to ensure I am migrating everything I can and I’m only partially familiar with Troopmaster. This is interesting data on camping and activities. Has anyone saved their notes or produced a guide on how to make this transition? I’m worried that I may miss something. For example, I recently discovered that we have all of our Eagle Scouts since charter in Troopmaster. I’m not sure if I can pull similar reports from IA. Thank you for your thoughts.
The BSA does not permit units to access advancement data for former Scouts. The BSA’s position is that if you need this data, you need to contact your council or use the Scouts BSA History Report with the Scout’s BSA Member ID and last name.
We are about to begin our migration from TM to ScoutBook as well. Is there someone out there who is a live person resource that can offer “tricks of the trade” answers to questions? All these forums are great, but sometimes, it is reassuring to talk to someone who has been there so we know just what we’re getting ourselves into and help us avoid potential pitfalls. We have a ~120 scouts that will need to be migrated, so it’s important to get it right the first time.
@LisaR Did you get any response? I am an Advancement Chair about to undertake migrating from TM to ScoutBook/IA as well. We have ~65 scouts and years of activities to migrate. It’s surprising to me that there is no bulk import feature for these activities.
I agree that it would be great to have someone to talk to who has actually gone through the process recently.
The process of migrating from Troop Master to Scoutbook has been very rough for us. We are not fully done yet. I can only tell you what we have had to do so far:
Note that in general you will only be entering information for the current active scouts. NOT for former scouts. Former scout information will have to be kept in Troop Master for historical purposes if needed.
Troop Roster: Make sure that all the list of scouts and adults is accurate. Most scouts and registered adults were already in Scoutbook. But some retired members were also in there. You cannot “delete” them. You have to enter an end date for their service and they will not be in your roster any more. Note that you also do not add scouts and adults. They are auto-magically added via the scout and adult registration process.
Scout Leadership: I had to do this by hand. In Scoutbook I had to enter their leadership history by hand. This took a while. I only did this for the active scouts.
Merit Badge Counselors: This is currently an unknown. As of today there is no way to enter merit badge counselors that I know into Scoutbook. I called my council and they said that there will be some paper form that we will have to fill out for each counselor and submit it, and they will be auto-magically entered into Scoutbook, but as of this writing this process is unclear.
Scout Ranks: This was mostly up to date already. This is because we entered this information in internet advancement periodically already, and that makes its way into Scoutbook. We just had to enter some updates.
Merit Badges: This was also mostly up to date already (same as ranks). We just had to enter some updates.
Camping Nights and Volunteer Hours: This is the killer. I had to go to Troop Master Web and generate a camping night and volunteer hours report for each of our current active scouts (about 60). This report was a separate PDF file for each scout. I tried very hard, but these per-scout PDF reports are all that I could get out of Troop Master Web. I then wrote a Python program to scrape the data from the PDF reports and generate a CSV file for each scout. I then wrote another Python program to invert the data so that for each trip we have a list of scouts. In the end we had about 250 events! We are now manually entering all 250 events into Internet Advancement. This will take many hours. I cannot believe that there isn’t a more automatic way to do this.
Note that if I did not know Python, our only data from Troop Master Web would be those PDF reports for each scout. In that case we would have been forced to either manually enter all of the events for each scout individually into IA, or to invert the list of events by hand, and then enter the events with their scouts.
Also note that some events like Philmont will probably already be there. Make sure you do not enter duplicates.
Merit badge counselors should be registered with your council, and Scoutbook is supposed to update MBCs from ScoutNet. Units should not be entering MBCs.
Go to your unit page in Scoutbook. Click on MB Counselor List. From here you can search for Merit Badge Counselors. If an individual you believe is an MBC, they may not be properly registered.
Sorry, I thought this was posted a couple of days ago, before I left for the weekend campout…
BSA’s official position is that the unit does not own any Scout’s information and the official method to get information about no-longer-active Scouts is to contact your Council. Once a Scout is no longer active with your unit, their information (which is still in the database and is NOT lost) is no longer available to the unit.
I did not realize that TroopMaster didn’t export this info. If they do not, that’s a good proposal to make to them. If they do, then we need to look at that gap in the export/import process.
That is by design. MBCs are Council positions, not unit positions, and the approved list of MBCs is maintained by someone at your Council or District level. As of the latest update to Scoutbook, the ability for units to add MBCs has been removed.
Our Troop had an out of council Life scout transfer in earlier this year. His former troop used Troopmaster and we use ScoutBook. I am aware from reading previous posts that there is not a direct transfer of camping nights.
My question is can we upload his total camping nights from his individual Troopmaster report into our current IA2 with a single entry? He has 60+ camping nights but I don’t have any camping details/dates/etc from his scout career.
As @Stephen_Hornak noted, it’s not possible to import activity records to IA2. However, you could (in theory) create a single 60-night entry. Some drawbacks include:
Incorrect reflection of camping nights for OA eligibility
Incorrect reflection of the number of camping “events” (not currently a problem in terms of automatic reporting/application of camping nights).
I’m kinda surprised that there isn’t a more granular report from TroopMaster, for all that some folks seem to love it.
