Run the commitment dashboard

If you’re the commitment chair or treasurer, the Service Program area under Admin is your desk: the program’s setup, every family’s ledger, and the approval queue. This guide is the tour; the bigger jobs each have their own guide in this section.

Set up the year

Before families start earning, the program needs its shape — all under Admin › Service Program:

• Program years — the year families are earning against.
• The buckets and plans — what your school tracks (hours, dollars, custom categories) and the plan choices families pick from. See Set up commitment categories.
• The rollover policy — what happens to surpluses and shortfalls at year-end. (Parents’ view: What happens at year-end.)

Set these deliberately — mid-year changes are technically possible and politically expensive.

The reports workspace

Admin › Service Program › Commitment Reports is where you’ll live during the year. Pick the program year at the top; three tabs cover the rest:

• Overview — the whole community at a glance: families complete, on track, behind, or without a plan; progress per category; pending approvals; and a completion-by-grade table that drills into the roster.
• Families & Ledger — every family and every entry. Browse by family (expand a row for its entries) or flip to a flat by-entry view; filter by grade, plan, status, source, or date. This is also where corrections happen (below).
• Commitment Approvals — everything families have submitted and officers haven’t decided. See Approve or deny submitted hours.

A mid-winter nudge to families with a large remaining balance (“here are the spring opportunities”) lands far better than a May surprise — Overview tells you who to nudge.

Add credit

Most credit arrives on its own — verified check-ins from volunteer shifts post automatically, and families submit their own activity into the approval queue. The rest — bake-sale contributions, buyout payments, the shift where the QR table never got set up — you enter through Bulk Credit, which works as well for one family as for eighty: see Add credit for many families at once.

A description a parent will recognize (“Fall Festival — cleanup crew”) saves questions later. They see exactly what you type.

Correct a mistake

Corrections don’t edit history — they supersede it. Find the entry in Families & Ledger and choose Adjust entry: a corrected copy takes over the math, the original stays as history, and the reason you write travels with it. Every entry also has a History view — who submitted, who approved, what changed — so “what happened to my hours?” always has an answer. (History began accruing when this feature shipped, so older entries show their correction chain instead.)

Removing an entry outright is Archive entry — it stops counting but stays in the ledger, and the family’s chip reads “Removed,” not “Denied.”

Close out the year

Year-end — penalties, waivers, and the rollover itself — is its own job with its own wizard: see Close out the program year.