Is there a way to stop allowing serve hours for the current year?
We stopped tallying service hours for the current year on 4/26 in order to prepare for our Court of Awards. Our stop gap is to ask families to hold off entering service hours until AHG’s new year of June 1st. Is there a way to go troop wide and begin rolling service hours into next year’s totals now?
Not currently. Let’s see if other AHG leaders chime in on this topic before.
This is our first year with TT. We are assuming that everything will reset on June 1st. Is that the case or is it something that happens when we reintegrate with Connect after June 1st?
Thanks!
What do you mean by “reset”? We don’t have anything like that, can you tell me what would be reset on June 1?
How does Troop Track keep track of service hours for the year? Or does it? Since this is our first year using it, I’m not sure what to expect with how tallying service hours works.
We keep track of service hours and stars by the AHG Calendar year. But for awards purposes, we set the cut off date to be 4/26 and all other hours earned between 4/27-5/31 roll into the girl’s records as carryover hours for the following year.
For example: Susie is an Explorer who records 126 hours of service between 6/1/2015-4/26/2015 and between 4/27/2016-5/31/2016 records 35 hours of service. She earns 12 service stars at Court of Awards. The other 6 hours plus the 35 hours recorded after our cutoff date, rolls into the 2016-2017 service tallies.
I guess our concern is how will we be able to mark that “these hours are from 2015-2016” and “these hours need to be counted toward 2016-2017”. Does any of that make sense? Or did I just confuse you more? 
I see. TroopTrack assigns hours to the level of the girl when she earns them (Patriot, Pioneer, etc). Prior to a Court of Awards, go to Achieve -> Manage Service Stars and you will see a summary of service hours at the current level and service stars. It will also include a link telling you if a girl has accumulated enough hours for a service star. Click that link and the stars will be added.
If a girl changes levels with the program year, her service hours above the stars she has earned will not roll over to the next level.
If a girl does not change levels with the program year, her service hours above the stars she has earned will count toward the stars she earns this year.
There is another tool that can help you with service hours. Go to Plan -> Participation Book and you will be able to build an interactive report of attendance, service, etc.
I hope that helps!
~ Dave
@dave Along the same lines as the original request, I too am looking to see if there is a way to start over on service hours. Our Awards ceremony is coming up in a few weeks and we have already closed out the books on logging service hours for this scouting year. We want the girls to continue to provide service to our community and continue to earn hours for future stars though. Hours entered today could potentially roll over for a girl staying at the same level, but for a bridging Tenderheart they will not count towards her new Explorer level. We don’t want to discourage our girls from continuing with service activities and the last thing we want the families to do is to keep a manual tracking log when we, as a Troop, have worked very hard to remove that crutch from them. Are there any plans in the works to create some type of master control to allow for Troops to reset for their scouting year? Yes our year is technically ending in a few weeks, but we have already closed the year for both service and badge work. I know other Troops consider their scouting year to end at other times of the year. I think it would be very helpful to create that type of functionality within TT that allows access to ‘cutoff’ activities and consider activities done for the year. I appreciate your assistance.
@ZataAnn & @SRUEDU, it seems like the (somewhat new) “Manage Service Stars” essentially takes away the need to reset service hours. If your cutoff date is 4/26/16, for example, then the Service Coord (or whoever) goes into Manage Service Stars on 4/27/16 and clicks any links that say “Add 1 star” “Add 2 stars” etc at that point in time.
Then even if a Tenderheart were to earn 20 hours between that day and the end of May, no actual Service Stars would appear in her profile. Instead, on June 1 (or later), the Service Coord could once again go in to Manage Service Stars page and then click all the current “Add # Stars” links (except for the hours earned at a previous level that don’t roll over - not sure what you’d do with those*).
*What you COULD do with those…
In our troop, we have a cut-off date for badges, but not really for service stars/hours. About a week or two before the ceremony, we get all the badges and current stars ready and added to whatever ribbon/etc we’re giving them on that year. Then a few days before the ceremony, we do one last check (in the Manage Service Stars) for any additional stars that have been earned, and then add those physical stars to their ribbon/etc as well. It’s usually no more than 15 total for the troop.
The reason we can do this is that we almost always have extra stars on hand. Whenever we order awards from AHG, we look at what the difference is between our order total and the amount at which the next higher shipping rate is calculated. Then we order enough extra stuff that we know we’ll use, to equal the difference.
E.g. Our total for needed badges, stars, etc is $185.75. We know the shipping cost increases after $200.00. So we can order $14.25 without increasing our shipping cost. Which turns out to be 19 service stars. So we order 4 or 5 from each level.
Sometimes, the “extra” amount is quite large, e.g. our total is $212 but we could go up to $300. Ordering 116 service stars seems a little excessive! 
In that case, we’ll also consider ordering extra Handbooks, Joining Awards, Explorer/PiPa Fire Safety/Camping/Outdoor Cooking badges, etc, anything that we know we’ll always need more of.
Hope this helps,
Karin
AHG MN0200
@schwammrs We do use the “Add Service Hours” similarly. The day after our cut-off, we add all our stars to our girls for ordering purposes. Our struggle is that while the girl may be an “official” Tenderheart for another 3 weeks, we don’t want to discourage them from serving for those few weeks and we roll our service hours over to the next year. Just like what @ZataAnn described, we allow our girls to roll their service over and count it toward the new year. Even when they move up to the next level, we will count it toward their new level.
I guess our troop is looking for a way to identify that we are no longer counting service hours for a current year. We’d like to be able to say, “these hours belong to the 2015-16 year” and after these dates, “these service hours belong to the 2016-17 year”. If it’s not a feature that would help other troops, we totally get that. We have a manual work around, but we have worked so hard this year to transition our families over to TT that we are slightly afraid to encourage manual record keeping. lol 
We don’t really keep a lot of things on hand. Typically our troop keeps one extra uniform on hand for each level. But storage for us is minimal, so we try not to order anything extra as most of the stuff is stored at coordinators’ homes.
Thank you the ideas!!
Christie
Yes, we need help with this, please! Ideally, we need a “reset” button as @SRUEDU describes so that any hours entered after a particular date we enter (or captured after an “awarded on” date we enter for service stars) will start accumulating fresh until the next “reset” or “awarded on” dates. Somehow we need the total on the service log page and/or reports for the girl to show only the current total since last awarded so she knows where she is for the current year (whatever that year is, which may be different for different troops based on when their cut-off date is for awarding). If it’s not possible to do a “reset”, could a filter be added that one could click that would only capture hours total since last awarded? Thanks for your help! We really love TT! Thanks for listening!
You’re brilliant. With all our kvetching about shipping prices, no one in our troop ever thought of doing that! Thanks for sharing!