Advancement Workflow

Advancement is the heart of Scouting, and the part most likely to fall behind. MySummitKeep is built so a meeting’s worth of sign-offs takes one pass through Quick Entry, scout- and parent-submitted work flows into an Approval Queue you can clear in minutes, and the official BSA upload is a download-and-go.

The Advancement workspace

Open Advancement from the sidebar to reach the workspace. It is a tabbed shell whose tabs change with your role and your unit’s program: leaders see Overview, Enroll, Approval Queue, Counselors, and Analytics. Troops, crews, and ships also get a Boards & Conferences tab; Cub Scout packs hide it, since adventures don’t use boards of review or Scoutmaster conferences.

The Overview tab shows the program dashboard, the rank journey, and quick links into the tools below. The page is program-aware: a Pack sees “Track Cub Scout adventure progress and rank achievements,” a Troop sees rank, awards, and program participation.

Quick Entry — record for many scouts at once

Advancement → Quick Entry (/advancement/quick-entry, titled Bulk Sign-Off on the page) is the workhorse for recording advancement after a meeting or campout. Pick one of three modes at the top, then select scouts and what they earned.

• Rank Requirements — choose a program, then a rank, then check off one or more requirements.
• Merit Badge Requirements — search for a badge, then check the requirements that were completed.
• Service Hours — log a service entry (description, hours, date, optional type and organization, and whether it counts toward Eagle).

You select scouts on the left (search by name) and the requirement(s) on the right. The same set of requirements applies to every selected scout, so signing off “Tenderfoot 4a” for a whole patrol is one operation. A completion date defaults to today; change it if the work was done earlier. Press Review & Submit and a Confirm Bulk Sign-Off dialog summarizes exactly who and what before anything is written; confirm it and a results panel reports each record as a success or failure.

Tip

This replaces the old per-scout, per-checkbox approach. Whether you think “by requirement” (one badge requirement, many scouts) or “by scout” (one scout, many requirements), Quick Entry covers both with the same scout-plus-requirement selection.

Approval Queue — triage what scouts and parents submit

When a scout or parent marks a requirement complete, it lands in Advancement → Approval Queue (/advancement/approval-queue) as a pending card rather than being auto-recorded.

Each card shows the scout, the requirement, and how long it has waited. You can:

• Filter by status and by scout name.
• Sort by Oldest First (FIFO) or Newest First — FIFO is the default so nothing gets stranded.
• Approve or Reject a single item. Rejecting requires a reason, which is returned to the submitter.
• Select all visible items and bulk approve the ones still pending.

A View all button on each card opens a per-requirement drill-in so you can approve or reject everyone who submitted the same requirement together.

Per-scout advancement detail

Click a scout from the roster to open their advancement page (/advancement/:memberId). It is tabbed: Rank Progress, Service Hours, Camping/Hiking, Activities, and History. An Export PDF button (top right) prints the whole record via your browser’s Save-as-PDF.

The Rank Progress tab shows the scout’s current rank and a progress summary — overall completion percent, merit badges earned vs. required, service hours logged, and positions held. The per-requirement audit trail lives on the History tab, where each requirement is color-coded by status — green when approved, red when rejected, amber when still pending — alongside the approval date and the name of who approved it (a rejection shows its reason). Every record carries its signer and date.

Note

Records are scoped and locked. The backend enforces object-level access so a leader, the scout, or a parent/guardian can read a given scout’s data, and an approved row stays attributed to its approver. This is the audit trail your district advancement chair relies on.

Scout Rank Progress (/advancement/ranks) is the scout’s own self-view — it shows your current rank, a requirements checklist, and a progress-to-next-rank bar, with advancement tips in the sidebar. For an aggregated, unit-wide rollup, use the Progress Report below.

New scouts who aren’t yet enrolled in a program won’t show progress — enroll them first from Advancement → Enroll (/advancement/enroll). See Member Import for adding scouts to your roster.

Merit badges and counselors

Merit badges are signed by counselors, not the unit leader. Manage your unit’s counselor list at Advancement → Counselors (/advancement/counselors, titled Merit Badge Counselors), where leaders add, edit, and remove counselors. Assigning a counselor to a particular scout’s badge happens in the badge workflow below, not on this list.

Each badge moves through a defined workflow on the scout’s badge page (/advancement/my-badges/:memberBadgeId):

1. Request Counselor — the scout requests one.
2. Counselor Assigned — a leader assigns the counselor.
3. Submit for Review — once the scout has completed the requirements.
4. Counselor Approved — the counselor signs off.
5. Verify Badge — a leader gives the final verification.

Tip

A counselor only sees the scouts assigned to them, not your full roster, so you can safely bring in counselors from outside the unit.

Courts of honor and recognition

There is no automatic “court of honor report” that prints name tags or certificates. To recognize advancement, record the earned requirements (Quick Entry above), then schedule the ceremony as a Court of Honor event from your calendar — Court of Honor is one of the built-in event categories. The advancement that’s already on each scout’s record is what you recognize.

Progress report and BSA export

For an aggregated, printable summary across the unit, use Advancement → Progress Report (/advancement/progress-report). It rolls up current rank, progress to next rank, merit badges and service hours (overall and within a date range) and exports to CSV.

When it’s time to make advancement official, open Advancement → Export (/advancement/export).

Choose a format with the toggle at the top:

• Scoutbook Plus TXT (recommended) — a pipe-delimited file, max 500 records per file, for upload to Scoutbook Plus.
• CSV (Legacy) — a BSA Internet Advancement 2.0 (IA2) CSV for legacy Internet Advancement.

Set a date range (leave it blank to export everything), check the categories to include (Ranks, Merit Badges, Positions, Service Hours), then Preview Export Data. The preview shows summary counts and a searchable, sortable table of every record. When it looks right, click Download.

Caution

Records for members without a BSA Member ID are excluded from the export, and the preview warns you who is missing one. Fill those in before submitting so no advancement is dropped. If you exceed the 500-record Scoutbook Plus limit, narrow the date range or categories.

Upload the resulting file at my.scouting.org under Internet Advancement (IA2). Within about a day, the BSA records the advancement officially.

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