With the “Needs Approval” Report moving to Scoutbook Plus, is there a way to easily tell if a MB requirement has been approved by an MBC? We used to be able to open the item to see if it had an MBC approval on it before we did troop approval. Now, when I’m looking at a specific completed MB requirement for a scout and click on that merit badge it just opens a blank screen in Scoutbook Plus. I tried it on multiple scouts and got the same thing every time.
If a MB requirement has been approved by an MBC, it should not be on the Needs Approval report because any MB requirements marked Counselor Approved are automatically marked Leader Approved.
MB requirements should not be approved by any leader unless a physical Blue Card or other proof an MBC signed off is provided.
2 Likes
Good to know. When we were using Scoutbook legacy for the past few months, we were having to “troop approve” items that MBC were approving already. I was confused by it, but thought it must have been a deliberate choice by developers.
It sounds like the MBC did not check the Counselor Approved box when they marked the requirement “complete”. Legacy Scoutbook has automatically set the Leader Approved state when Counselor Approved is selected for several years.
If MBC approves the req it approves - it does not approve for whole Merit Badge even if MBC approves the whole
They were approving them. That was what was weird. I would see the item in our “needs approval” report for a while, be sort of irritated that it hadn’t been MBC approved and click through to see who the MBC was assigned on it to see what the hold up was. It would show that it had a counselor approval on the requirements (and on full MBs at times) once I opened it up, so I just assumed that was the direction Scoutbook developers had gone in 2025. So I would just add our leader approval on top of it so we could get it onto the PO. Yes, I double-checked multiple times that I wasn’t leader approving something I shouldn’t/hadn’t been done correctly by MBC. They were on top of it and Scoutbook was operating differently, so we went with it.
I know in theory Scoutbook should operate a certain way and previously had, but this was our experience for the past few months. I’m hoping to not see a repeat of it now that the needs approval report is migrated to Scoutbook Plus. I haven’t had a chance to work with it much since we just had a COH this weekend, so all of our prep work for that was done in Scoutbook legacy in the past month.
I appreciate all of the responses. Hopefully using Scoutbook plus for this now ends up being hassle-free!
Only MB requirements are automatically Leader Approved when Counselor Approved. The overall MB must still be Leader Approved because the Guide to Advancement requires the Scout and Scoutmaser meet to discuss the MB experience after the MBC signs off but before the MB is complete. The way Scoutbook handles this is by not marking the overall MB Leader Approved. That is to be done after this Scout/Scoutmaster meeting.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
