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.
With the start of the new academic year, our finance team was elated to move to integrated Stripe Payments. However, as we have just realized, there are 2 critical flaws that make the current Scoutbook Plus platform virtually unusable for our parents.
They cannot pay off their total balance. (A transaction-based payment system just does not account for the realities of how units run. Our parents often make partial payments or receive credits for fundraising. Swapping back and forth between Stripe Payments and other forms to rectify the balance is absolutely NOT an acceptable solution)
They are confused by a giant list of “unpaid” line items which they have already paid. (Being that every payment has to be based on a transaction, all of their old negative line items are now listed as “unpaid” with no way to show that they have already been addressed.
These 2 limitations will force us to stop using the online payment system we have been hoping to use for so long. If you could add 2 features, that would make all the difference.
Allow for a “Pay off balance” button that creates a transaction for their current balance. It just needs to create an instant transaction for their current balance. Put it right at the top of their payment log page.
@MichaelFiore - this is not a bug but rather the design that was chosen. In a previous post on the topic it was given to the dev team for consideration.
Your only other option is to enter transactions as net rather than gross.
Could you clarify what you mean by entering transactions as net rather than gross?
The only solution we’ve been able to construct so far is for those with access to create a “Consolidation” payment for the balance and then a matching charge for the same amount. However, this would require us to do that regularly, which defeats the point of an integrated system, since it’s the same effort as making manual payments through PayPal, ACH, or other digital payment methods.
Understood that this is not a “bug” and the chosen functionality. However, the UX process is driven by user feedback and testing. It seems like this is a highly requested feature that warrants being repeated by everyone experiencing the same pain points. The more feedback you get on this topic, the more it will help prioritize what updates come next, correct?
@MichaelFiore - what I mean by a net transaction is if the scout/scouter owes 150 but has a credit due from the unit for 30 you would enter the transaction as 120.
Not necessarily, unfortunately. The folks at national who decide what to prioritize do so on the basis of whatever their own priorities are, not necessarily a “heat map” from the users. None of the developers or folks making those decisions are on these boards. Based on things I’ve seen in other posts, the developers themselves don’t determine strategic priorities (e.g. implementing a particular new feature prior to fixing a particular bug), but might have feedback on tactical priorities (e.g. fix this bug before that bug on a list of bugs that have been approved to fix). It’s also possible that they are just executing a list that has been prioritized for them and they have no governing ability for the priorities at all.
This seems to be more the agreement with stripe in how it works to me. As you seem to not be able to get to the Stripe account or say send to Stripe account #BSAT49499.
Say a family is trying to get paid up on monthly dues. They are now afraid that making numerous credit card payments for the same dollar amount in a short period of time will cause their credit card to be locked down for suspicion of fraud.
Our Unit committees have chosen monthly as a way of making scouting affordable. There will be many different workflow decisions that Units and Chartering Organizations could make. Scouting America should try to provide solutions that support those decisions. They should not force Units into conforming to a prescribed workflows.
@John_Kevin_Hickey - I recall that this has been brought to the development team. This may also involve the stripe agreement. If anything is done on this it will be in the change log
