Here are the various Trail Life USA announcements regarding the termination of our agreement to provide dedicated home office services to Trail Life USA.
We’ve already started receiving questions about this. We will post the questions and answers here. Please feel free to post your own questions once you have reviewed the discussions on this post.
How does this process work?
On February 2 your TroopTrack account will expire. Once that happens, you won’t be able to do anything in TroopTrack unless you purchase a subscription. Trail Life USA recommends you export as much of your data as possible before then and they have suggested instructions on how to do that, provided above.
How are new members registered?
We don’t know yet. According to Trail Life USA’s statement they will begin rolling out a new system for chartering, registration and advancement this month.
Can we still order advancements?
We don’t know how that will work yet. You may need to log in to a separate system to order advancements in the future.
We looked at the pricing page, and the signup button does NOT have Trail Life USA as an option - how do we handle that?
Just log in to your existing account on TroopTrack. If you have the edit troop settings privilege you will be able to purchase your account. A TroopTrack subscription is $99/year or $10/month.
We’ve got a bazillion photos in TroopTrack. The Trail Life USA instructions basically tell us to save the pictures we want. That will take forever. Isn’t there a better way?
Trail Life USA is rolling out their own member management system starting this month. Why should we continue using TroopTrack?
Trail Life USA has not announced that they are rolling out a troop management system comparable to TroopTrack. They have announced that they will provide features for
Charter management
Member registration
Advancement
There’s a lot more to managing a troop than just these features, but if you only use TroopTrack for renewing your charter and registering your members, you probably shouldn’t purchase a TroopTrack subscription. If you use other troop management features, however, we hope you will consider purchasing a TroopTrack subscription.
Here’s a convenient list of some of the features TroopTrack includes that we think you should consider.
Tracking detailed advancement in bulk
Managing your calendar
Tracking finances
Tracking equipment
Publishing a web site
Collecting payments for events
Communicating with your members via email and text messages
Keeping an offline copy of your troop data in a mobile application
Accessing your troop data from a mobile device
Tracking attendance and service hours
Providing online access for every member of your troop and their parents
Creating a private intranet just for your members
Controlling access to features and information based on privileges
Advanced reporting capabilities
Privately sharing photos, documents, and web sites
Not to mention, for the first time since Trail Life USA started, you will be able to contact TroopTrack staff directly for support.
We’re a brand new troop and don’t have any money. Does that mean we can’t use TroopTrack?
Nope. We already offer new AHG troops a scholarship for their first year and we’ve extended that offer to Trail Life USA troops. Troops that have chartered in the last year automatically get a free subscription for the remainder of their first year.
We’re not a new troop but we’re having financial problems. We’d like to use TroopTrack but can’t afford it. What options do we have?
We have a scholarship program for you - contact us by sending an email to matt@trooptrack.com with a little information about why you need a scholarship and we will help you out.
I shared your Facebook post about the Trail Life USA transition and my troop purchased a subscription. How do I get the $20 refund you promised on Facebook?
Send an email to dave@trooptrack.com telling him when you shared the post and the name of the person who paid for the subscription and we’ll refund $20.
Is there going to be a 30 day trial available for transitioning Trail Life USA troops who are unsure if the pure TroopTrack experience would serve their needs?
@emfabric Here’s a list of features that will probably disappear on February 3. I think it’s pretty complete.
Trail Life USA specific user guide. This was maintained by the home office and was pretty out of date. We will support TL troops directly from this forum just like everyone else.
Chartering & re-chartering
Registration of new members and renewal of existing members
Leader pages
The ability to purchase awards
In addition, a few new things will appear:
You will be able to add people to TroopTrack without registering them with National
You will be able to submit help desk tickets directly to our staff
Pages that require a member to be a registered member before you can use them will no longer have this restriction
Your TroopTrack subscription will operate independently of your troop charter
You will be able to modify your subdomain
There are probably some other things that will change here as well. I’ll post them as I think of them.
Somewhere in the FAQs it said that paypal is the primary payment method for per troop pricing. Our troop already has a paypal account recorded in troop track, but when I clicked the button for “pay for one month $10” it opened a credit card window instead of a paypal window. I don’t want to pay now, I want to schedule an automatic paypal payment for one month starting on the date that the month begins (Feb 2). How may I do that? Thanks.
Hi @JamesAult. We are trying to move away from PayPal for TroopTrack payments. They are a pain to deal with and as a result there is a manual step that we have to perform as well. We are trying to avoid that extra step in the future.
If you use a credit card to purchase an extra month it will add a month to the current expiration date, even if you purchase it before the expiration date.
Thanks @JosephWIlls. It is $99 for the entire troop, no matter how many members you have - the troop pays $99 once per year and everyone gets to use it.
With the separation of TLUSA and TT can we expect continued upgrades that pertain to TL troops like leaf tracking and bulk updating of custom awards or do you realistically not see much future improvement because of a much smaller customer base?
@joshuasanders - I actually expect to see more development of those things in the future. Up until now, we only worked on the items the home office wanted us to work on and leaf tracking, custom awards, and other troop management issues were very low on the list of priorities.
You will be able to add people to TroopTrack without registering them with National
The Trail Life USA home office has clarified that you should not add boys who are not members of your troop to TroopTrack for a number of reasons. We totally agree with that. We aren’t listing this item as an advantage, merely as a thing that will change. Since TroopTrack will no longer have any way of knowing who is or isn’t a registered member, it will be your responsibility to make sure membership requirements and standards are adhered to.
The user permissions change a bit from what I read. It appears that we will have more control over who has access. Is there any limitations on our ability to limit non registered parents or others from seeing certain data?