There is also a purchase order, associated with the "Needs Purchasing" report. You can access this by clicking "Troop Reports," "Needs Purchasing Report," and then clicking the "View Open PO #" button. You can print this report for the trip to the Scout Shop to try to buy things. And this is also where we make the connection to the Internet Advancement system: THIS IS CRITICAL!

From the PO screen, click the "ScoutNET File" button at the bottom of the screen. Choose whether you want to create a file with "Just New Stuff" (the default, and preferred in most cases) or "All Advancement" and click the "Troop 3001 File" button. This will create a CSV ("comma separated values") file. Your browser may prompt you to open the file in Excel or similar spreadsheet program--DON'T DO THIS, it will mangle things. Instead, save the file to your hard drive.

Now we need to upload this file to the Internet Advancement system. Go to http://www.northernstarbsa.org/internet-advancement and click the "Access Internet Advancement" button. Choose "Returning User" and enter unit ID 100196002, password [contact Scoutmaster or committee chair for password].

Click "Continue" on the page with instructions about loading the roster, and then click "Upload Advancement File." Choose the file you just created from Scoutbook--it will have a file name like "Internet_Advancement_Troop_3001_PO[number].csv"--and click "Upload File."

When it finishes, you'll see a report of which Scouts were updated. If there were Scouts in the exported file that don't match the Internet Advancement database, you'll get that list as well. When I first uploaded the file, I got a mismatches on some names; I corrected this by going into Scoutbook and changing their names to match Internet Advancement. This may happen again with other Scouts whose names in Scoutbook differ from Internet Advancement, in which case the fix is to adjust the name in Scoutbook, create the ScoutNET file again, and upload the file again.

On the Internet Advancement screen, click OK. This will load the roster. You can view individual Scouts' records here if you want by clicking the Ranks, Merit Badges, and Awards buttons. I'd recommend this if you want to be sure that their records were updated. Then click "Next."

On the next screen, click the "Submit to Council" button. This will make the updates official; until this is done, the advancement doesn't appear in the registrar's records, which makes submitting an Eagle application impossible.

From here you can click "View Advancement Report" to get the official report of the most recent changes. You should print this out and reconcile it against the PO you printed from Scoutbook. The Scout Shop needs this report when you go to pick up awards.