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.
Scoutbook Plus feature request. Have a standard finance report (more or less, single-click) for current account balances of all unit members, including adults, using plain terminology and simple non-repetitive formatting. No date selection to introduce error.
Bonus points for grouping adults separately from youth and ability to sort/filter report by balances without having to manually manipulate the report in Excel/Sheets. (In all three of my units, we are usually most concerned with who has a negative balance or extreme positive/negative balances.) Nirvana would allow grouping/sub-totaling the report by family, but I’m not holding out hope there.
Background. At least monthly for years, we’ve been running Payment Log reports in Legacy Scoutbook from Troop/Pack Reports > Payment Log Report. To get the correct current balances of accounts, which is the key piece of information we need, you have to make sure you select all dates or change the start date to a date before the longest-tenured member has been with the unit. Otherwise, transactions are excluded and the balance is off. Also, the report uses the term “net change” rather than balance and the CSV export has multiple balance columns (notionally the same, if the report is run correctly).
Enter Scoutbook Plus with a feature I genuinely love (despite its horrendous naming convention): Reports > New Custom Report (Report Builder). In here, you can select “Show Payment Balance” and get a neatly formatted, CSV exportable report with exactly what you need, no chance for incorrect balances. But… you can’t select adults on this report. (While our pack just applies adult’s credits/debits to their child’s payment log, our troop has adults without associated children.)
We are thinking that was added to builder (RB) when payment log was only for Youth many years ago. And as Adults cannot be selected in RB - we are thinking through options. But I would try the above
Glad to hear you’re thinking through options. The RB report isn’t perfect, but it’s a perfectly acceptable solution if it only included adults.
On a related note, what’s the future of adults seeing their own payment log balances when they’re in multiple units? In my case, I’m a parent/leader in a pack & a troop and a leader in the linked troop. My only payment log transactions are entered in the linked troop, but that’s not the default view when I go to My Payment Logs from legacy My Account (the default is the troop where I’m leader/parent). I can see it by picking myself off the linked troop’s legacy Troop Roster screen and I’ve found several workarounds to “trick” Scoutbook into displaying it in legacy My Profile.
When I run the Payment Log report with those options I get 2 sections for the members, the first is: Payment Log Summary Report which has Net Change
followed by: Payment Log Balance Report which has balances.
There is not a desire by Scouting America IT to produce a bunch of “canned” reports using different combinations of options that already available.
@edavignon The current canned report has several draw-backs that I described above, but most importantly is that its default settings produce erroneous reports.
I certainly understand not wanting to produce a “bunch” of default reports. But, this is probably one of the most common reporting use-cases. That said, expanding RB to allow selection of adults would solve nearly every problem described and not create an additional “canned” report. Alternatively, changing the existing Payment Log report’s default to all dates would solve the biggest problem (though still leave a lot to be desired).
The Payment Log Balance Report section when you check Include Financial Statement ignores the dates and includes all. The Payment Log Summary Report section does respect the date selection.
The balances of individual Scouts is the key piece of data that needs to be error-proof or at least error-free without changing defaults. We don’t rely on Scoutbook reporting for tracking our assets and liabilities. I’ve never met anyone who uses Scoutbook for all of their accounting needs. (Though, it would be great if it could truly handle that and we didn’t have to pay for something else.)
