2019 brought many changes to Scouting and Scout Manager. Here are a few of the highlights.
2019 brought many changes to Scouting and Scout Manager. Here are a few of the highlights.
In 2019 the BSA made Scoutbook free to all scouting units. The new system replaced the aging Internet Advancement system they’d been using for years, but also provided better online accessibility to all users with a new user interface that works similar to Scout Manager.
At first, this really hit us hard at Scout Manager. We received countless emails about our plans to continue offering our service and some units left us for the free service. We stood firm and rebounded nicely. Our mission has always been to provide a superior service than what the BSA and others were putting out. Our measures of success include service, reliability, performance and features you’ll love. Many of the former measures go unnoticed until a unit moves to Scoutbook and they realize that slow performance makes their job take much more time and service is a vision of hope in a post. We’re proud of what we’ve built for you and we intend to keep it that way.
It took us quite a bit more time than we expected to get the Scoutbook integration working. It seemed like the developers over at Scoutbook were actively working against us. After our first integration work they changed login security controls making it impossible to integrate dynamically. While frustrating we applaud their work in creating a better and more secure environment.
After much work and trials, our current integration using a Chrome plugin has proven to be ultra-reliable and integrates nicely with Scoutbook. It provides the ability to receive updates from Scoutbook as well as push updates (e.g. award data) back to the BSA.
Thank you to everyone who helped with testing and working through the early issues with us.
Our new accounting module makes financial management cleaner and easier to manage especially for year over year accounting. You may hear us refer to it as “checkbook accounting” as it removes double-entry and provides an easier way to tag transaction amounts to one or more accounts. While account types like Revenue, Expense and Liability are still there its much easier to avoid the issues that popup with double-entry.
If you haven’t migrated to the new accounting its definitely something to consider for the new year!