We are looking to adopt Scoutbook as the main gateway for all of our troop activities. Currently we are using troop master and want to get away from it. Is there anyone from Scoutbook that can be designated to work with one of the troop adults to support this transition.
We have reached out to the council designated individual and have not been able to connect. Any help with this is appreciated as we would like to recharter via Scoutbook at the end of the year.
Thanks in advance.
The Scoutbook folks don’t really have staff to support individual units, per se. It’s mostly just volunteers here in the forums (either SUAC folks like @JenniferOlinger and others and non-SUAC folks who’ve been using Scooutbook for a while).
My recommendation is to start with the help documents, which while to some extent dated, still give a very good understanding of a lot of Scoutbook’s capabilities and processes. The link actually goes to one of my posts on the forums a while back listing some of what I found to be the most helpful how-to docs.
If folks want a “safe” space to play with Scoutbook, there’s a sandbox server available at https://scoutbookpp.scouting.org (note the “pp” in the URL). That sandbox server does not play with live data, and you login by using the “canned” credentials (snapshot below). I find that poking around on the sandbox helped me avoid creating mountains of trouble when I started out as our Unit Admin and Key 3 Delegate.
Beyond that, if you’re unable to figure out how to do stuff, and can’t find it in the help docs, the forums are here to help. The only requests are that folks take advantage of the search functionality on the forums to see if someone else has asked the question already, and that new questions get their own thread (as opposed to getting stuffed into an unrelated thread) so things are easier to keep track of and respond to.
Good luck and welcome to the new crazy! 
Yes that is correct. We have not been able to connect with Ron as he appears to be tied up. I was hoping maybe someone else would be able to provide us some time for this.
@MadhukarGundamaraju you need to look for a University of Scouting Class to attend - or play in the sandbox and use the Help section
@CharleyHamilton yes have been doing that and have most of the things figured out. We just want to get clarifications on new scout onboarding, payments (how it works as we have a council component and a troop component), also want to understand and figure out a process on how to onboard new scouts (partial year), not sure I have seen much in that regard.
@DonovanMcNeil thanks for the suggestion. I will follow that process and see how that goes. Do you know of any offerings in the near future?
Come to Texas and attend mine in November LOL
Onboarding is simple - once a Scout is registered with council 24 hours later they are automatically on your Scoutbook Roster.
Recharter is not Scoutbook, it is another platform. If you have troop fees I do not believe you can use the system to collect them.
@DonovanMcNeil thanks for the offer, any chance you can make it virtual for others to attend?
Thanks good to know that the scoutbook roster is refreshed within 24 hours of registration with the council.
Yes, we have the Internet Advancement engine that we are trying to use for the recharter however need to make sure all our adults are YPT certified past 12/31/2023. Figuring out these nuances as we go through the recharter steps.
That’s largely true in recharter for almost all of us, whether we have past experience with Scoutbook/IA2 or not. It’s like a multi-body physics problem, with the occasional moment of quantum tunneling where nothing seems to make sense. :^)
Longhorn Council - University of Scouting 2022 There is some virtual elements - not sure on my classes
The Training Manager at my.scouting has a YPT Report that you can use to see when your adult leaders most recently completed YPT training.
Different councils have different rules with regard to YPT renewals for recharter purposes, so you would want someone who knows your council’s requirements.
There is also a getting started guide here:
@MadhukarGundamaraju - and certainly being a scoutbook user for a looooonnnnggg time I would be glad to help as well. The first step is to log into scoutbook.scouting.org and make sure what you see there looks correct or reasonably so.
Hello Madhukar, I helped transition my son’s troop from TroopMaster to Scoutbook, when I took over as the new Advancement Chair. I had previously served as a Den Leader in two different Packs. One of the packs had used SB and the other used TroopMaster’s cub program, so I had a little knowledge of each. Here was a big key to my son’s troop’s successful transition to SB: for six months, they paid for a Troopmaster subscription, AFTER we had begun transitioning to SB. This allowed me to take time to manually enter all the activity data from Troopmaster into SB, such as campouts, hikes, service events. It also gave me the opportunity to take a fine toothed comb to each of the older scout’s SB profiles, to make sure that all their previous merit badges had flowed across from TroopMaster. Some badges didn’t. This was because those badges had never been properly filed with the local council office. That is a big disadvantage of Troopmaster. It doesn’t synch with a scout’s official council record. So things can get accidentally omitted. Having TroopMaster for that extra 6 months was the key to our success with transition.
@Stephen_Hornak thanks for your offer and will definitely reach out to you when I hit a block. How can I contact you outside of this forum? I can be reached at madhugraju@gmail.com and once we connect I can share my contact info or we can meet on zoom sometime.
Really appreciate your help with this.
Hello @BrianHeflin thanks for your suggestion regarding the renewal of troop master. We have done the same and extended it until the middle of next year, will likely extend beyond that depending on how we make this transition to Scoutbook.
We have proactively updated info on both sides and just need parents to validate the info. However a lot of the parents/scouts have never accessed scoutbook. The first step we are looking to do is to introduce scoutbook to the parents and then see how we can reconcile the scouts activities. Hope to make this transition and you will probably see my postings for help in the future.
When I moved a Troop for TM to SB many years ago - I did Not duplicate all events - instead I went in and made one event for each scout (June 1 - Timmy did 132 Hours of Service) - in MOST situations it is the total (hours, nights, etc) that matter. Things like OA Election are different but easy to manage
We have been duplicating work for years in TB and SB. Finally going to attempt moving strictly to SB in coming year in hopes of making life easier for our Advancement Chair. We currently use TM as our Troop Website as well so curious best options for website we we discontinue TM.
I would suggest FIRST using both ScoutBook and TroopMaster together. Depending on your UNIT and Council - there are a lot of activities and Awards that are Not tracked in ScoutBook…
I ALWAYS advise Troops and Crews to run both TM and ScoutBook together for at least a year (if already using TM). This allows the Troop leadership, Scouts, and Parents to see what information is Not tracked in ScoutBook. Keep in mind that this will be different Council to Council. One Council may have No extra advancement and or awards programs (outside of Nationals) - but another Council may have a number of items.
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