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.
I’m not usually paying too much attention to what I approve on Scoutbook as the Adv. Chair since we are a small troop and Scouts are Trustworthy. Anyway, I have just noticed that for some reason 2 of my newer scouts had all of their 1st class requirements checked off (and me approving this not realizing it…). Anyway, that’s not the real issue. These requirements were all checked off for the same date etc. This makes no sense since these are 2 separate scouts, different families, different parents…There is no way these 2 parents would have done the exact same thing for the exact same dates. It just doesn’t make sense. Anyway, I have no idea how to undo this action. I also don’t know how something like this even happened.
There is no easy way to undo Leader Approval, which is why I generally advise folks to be very careful with the Approve All button. I’ve spent too much time correcting my own mistakes to want others to “have that fun”. :^)
Generally speaking, scouts who are connected to their accounts, as well as their parents and any leaders with Approve Advancement or Full Control permissions can mark anything Completed. The official BSA position is, essentially, that marking something Completed is the same thing as putting a check mark in the left column of the handbook rank tracking pages. I don’t personally agree with that, but that’s the official position as conveyed by the volunteers with the Scoutbook User Advisory Council.
In terms of how to remove the approvals, there are no easy steps.
Go to each scout who has erroneous requirements/ranks Leader Approved. For individual requirements, go to the requirement, remove the Leader Approved date and checkmark, then save. If you want to remove the Completed tag, you must go back in again, remove the Completed date and save again. For ranks that are marked Leader Approved, you usually have to remove the Leader Approved date and checkmark for the overall rank first, then go through the requirements one at a time.
As you can tell, this is a pretty laborious process. The way that I keep myself on track is to use the Audit Logs under My Dashboard → Administration → My Units → Unit Reports. If you run the audit log report for advancement over the relevant time period when the approvals happened, you can see what was approved and who marked it.
The audit data will tell you who marked it complete - (see image) - you will have to go one by one to unapprove each requirement and clear date if needed
Looks like I fixed it. Looks like just a date was entered as completion for the rank. It was entered by the parents. I just deleted the date and voila fixed. Again, still doesn’t make any sense since these parents don’t really know each other that well save for meetings. Kids don’t even go to same school or see each other except meetings. The date that was chosen was the exact same date AND it was a date that made no sense because it was last year before each kid had really even done much with the Troop. Well, it’s fixed but this is gonna bug me for a while as to how those dates were entered. Thanks for the help and information. Greatly appreciated!
I would check to see if the parent is also a leader (or was in the pack, for example). That might have seen them assigned permissions to the scout that wouldn’t be appropriate for them if they are just a parent.
