Set up commitment categories
For commitment officers: the buckets families' commitments are measured in — renaming, reordering, adding custom ones, and the defaults that hang off them.
Every number in the program lives in a bucket — Service Hours, Financial, whatever else your school measures. The buckets themselves are configured at Admin › Service Program › Commitment kinds, and they shape what every family’s dashboard collects and displays.
The buckets
Service Hours and Financial come built in; you can add custom buckets — “Auction Dollars,” “Events Attended” — as your school’s program grows. For each one you control:
- The display name — rename freely; this is what families see on their dashboard and in every picker.
- The order — the dashboard shows buckets in the order you set here.
- The unit and precision — hours, dollars, a count, or a decimal. The unit locks once real entries reference the bucket, because changing what existing numbers mean is not a rename.
- Whether a year-end shortfall converts to a charge — per bucket, feeding the year-end penalties step.
- Active or not — deactivating hides a bucket from pickers and dashboards without touching its history. Built-in buckets can be deactivated but never deleted.
A short code rides along with each bucket for CSV imports and admin tools — set it once, keep it boring, and it can’t change after saving.
Two defaults that live here
- Default self-report category — what’s preselected when a family opens the Log activity dialog. Set it to whatever families log most (usually hours), or leave it blank to make every family pick each time.
- Credit transfers — the school-wide switch that turns the transfer feature on or off. Off by default.
Change these early, not often
Adding a bucket in September is planning; adding one in February means a year whose targets and history straddle two shapes. Settle the buckets alongside the year’s plans, before families start earning, and treat renames as the only mid-year edit that’s truly free.