Your first 7 days

Scout works best when your team and your data are both in. Here's a 7-day path that gets both in place, in the order that keeps the fewest things blocked.

Scout keeps this list too

Until your setup is done, the dashboard opens with a card headed Getting started and titled Bring your church into Scout. It holds six steps, with a progress ring and a count of how many of the six are done:

• Add your people
• Set up groups & teams
• Set up giving
• Set up kids check-in
• Invite your team
• Set up your app experience

The first three retire the card. Once your church has people, at least one group or team, and an answer to the giving question, the card disappears from the dashboard and the remaining steps move to a Finish setup · N left pill above Settings at the bottom of the left sidebar. The steps can be done in any order, and the days below are one workable order.

1. 1

   Day 1: Import your people

   Pick the source you trust most: a CSV export from your old system, a Planning Center account, or a clean spreadsheet. On a computer, open People, click Import, and choose From CSV or From Planning Center. The Import button doesn't render below tablet width, so from a phone use the Add your people step on the dashboard's Getting started card, which opens the same screen at any size.

   Bring phone numbers with you if you have them. Sunday's kiosk finds a family by a complete 10-digit phone number and nothing else, so a household with no phone on file can't be looked up at the kiosk.

   The data doesn't have to be perfect yet, because you'll merge duplicates on day 6. Full instructions: Import from CSV and Import from Planning Center (PCO).

2. 2

   Day 2: Invite your team

   Go to Settings → Users and click + Invite. Add the people who will use the dashboard: staff, key volunteers, whoever runs check-in. Congregants don't need an invitation; anyone in your directory with an email on their record can sign in to the member app on their own.

   Keep it small for the first week. Adding staff never changes your bill. See Inviting your team.

3. 3

   Day 3: Build the service and the teams

   Open Services. On a brand new account you get Get Started plus three starter templates under Or jumpstart with a starter template. Clicking Use Template on Sunday Morning creates the template, its 9:00 and 11:00 service times, and its sections in one action. To build your own instead, click New and choose Service template.

   A template only starts scheduling once it has at least one service time. After that Scout keeps six weeks of dated services on the calendar and tops them up nightly, so there is nothing to generate each week.

   Then set up who serves. Go to Teams, click New Team, and add the positions that team fills. Back on the template, under Serving Teams, click Add Team and use the steppers to say how many people each position needs. Those counts are what create the empty slots you fill on Volunteer schedule in the sidebar.

   See Setting up your first service, Setting up a serving team, and Scheduling volunteers.

4. 4

   Day 4: Set up check-in

   Go to Check-in and click Room setup in the top right. Click Add room for each space and give it a name, an age range in years, and an optional capacity. Scout matches a child to a room by age. A room carries no teachers field; your kids volunteers are scheduled on Teams and Volunteer schedule like every other team.

   Add at least one room before Sunday. With none, every check-in is refused with a "No room available" message that names the child and tells you to create rooms in Check-In Setup.

   Set the kiosk PIN on the same page, under Set PIN. That PIN is the only way into the kiosk's staff panel, which is where checkout lives.

   Two optional controls sit further down that page: Volunteer phone pickup, and the Who can release children list it opens. Turn those on only if you want volunteers releasing kids from their own phones. See Setting up rooms.

5. 5

   Day 5: Set up giving

   Two separate questions here, and you can answer both.

   For gifts arriving online, open Giving, click Giving setup, and either click Connect with Stripe or point churchHQ's Give tab at the giving page your church already uses. Stripe onboarding asks for your EIN, bank details, and a photo ID. See Set up Stripe Connect.

   For cash and check, create a fund first. Scout seeds none, and the Record Donation form requires one. Go to Giving → Funds, click New Fund, and the first one prefills as General. Then use Record gift to log a few weeks of past gifts so the picture isn't empty. The form has a Date field, so backdating works. See Recording offline gifts.

   The whole Giving section needs the View giving data permission, which the seeded Staff role doesn't carry.

6. 6

   Day 6: Clean up duplicates

   Imports always create some duplicate people. Open People on a computer and click Find duplicates in the top right, which opens a page of possible pairs. Each pair gets Merge or Dismiss, and you choose which record survives.

   That button doesn't render on a phone, so this one needs a laptop. Merging is permanent, and the absorbed record is written to the audit log. See Cleaning up duplicates.

7. 7

   Day 7: Run your first Sunday

   Open Check-in, find this week's service, and click Open session. The page then shows the kiosk URL with Copy and Open kiosk beside it. Open that URL on the tablet or laptop by the door.

   Parents enter their full phone number on the keypad, tap each child, and check in. Labels print automatically: two per child, plus a parent receipt carrying a SECURITY CODE and a QR.

   At the end of the service, checkout runs from the kiosk's staff panel. Triple-tap the small Scout logo in the top left corner, enter the staff PIN, and click Check out a family. Type the family's code into Pickup code, tick the children under Leaving now, choose from Who's collecting?, and release. Someone who isn't on the approved list can still be released by a staff member, who has to type a reason.

   See Running the kiosk and Picking up kids.

The kiosk has no camera scanner

The QR on the parent receipt is a claim ticket. Scanning it with any phone opens a page headed Pickup pass with your church's name, and the line "Show this to a kids ministry volunteer at the classroom door." It carries no child names, no rooms, and no release button, which is what makes it safe to print.

The camera scan lives in the member app, for volunteers you've added under Who can release children on the check-in setup page. When a session is open, their churchHQ home shows a Kids pickup is open banner that opens the scanner. Everyone else uses the typed code at the kiosk.

After week 1

Scout recalculates every person overnight, in one nightly pass. Until that first pass runs, the status column in People shows a dash for everyone, including people you imported hours earlier.

After that, expect patience. Scout holds a person at New for their first 60 days rather than guessing, counting from the day their record was created, which for an import is the day you imported. Someone Scout has never watched do anything stays New as well, rather than dropping to Inactive, because no data is not the same as evidence of drift.

So the engagement read starts meaning something around month three, once Scout has watched a few months of serving, giving, and groups. What Scout's statuses mean covers what each status is claiming.