Scoutbook, Scoutbook Plus, and which one you are looking at
Scouting America has been moving units off the older Scoutbook site and onto Scoutbook Plus, at advancements.scouting.org. Both are reached with the same my.scouting login. If the page you are on says Scoutbook Plus at the top, you are in the newer one, and that is where advancement entry for Cub Scout dens now lives for most units.
The menus have moved more than once, so instructions you find in a Facebook group from two years ago may not match what is on your screen. The shape is stable even when the labels move: there is a roster of your den, a per-Scout advancement view, and a set of reports.
Where the den's advancement lives
As a den leader you have access to your own den. Open your den from the unit roster and you get the list of Scouts. From there you can go two ways: into one Scout and see every adventure, or into the den's reports and see everyone at once. The second one is the one you want on a Sunday night.
Print or export it if your council's report menu offers that. A printed grid on the kitchen table beats a phone screen when you are trying to see a pattern across eight Scouts.
If your view does not match your Cubmaster's
What you can see depends on the access your unit gave you. A den leader normally sees their own den; a pack admin sees everything; a parent sees their own Scout. If your den is not there at all, that is a permissions problem and not a you problem: ask whoever holds the unit's key three at your pack, usually the Cubmaster or the committee chair, to check that you are registered in the right position and connected to the right den.
Two more things worth knowing before you start reading rows and trusting them:
- Depending on how the unit is set up, parents can record work done at home, which then waits for a leader to approve it. Those rows sit quietly for months if nobody looks.
- A Scout who transferred in brings their history with them, so an empty-looking record may mean the transfer has not finished rather than that the Scout has done nothing.
- Adventure names changed with the 2024 program, so an older record may show a name you do not recognize on this year's list.
Read it in three passes
Pass one, by rank. Is Bobcat done for everybody? Until it is, it is the only thing that matters, because a Cub Scout completes Bobcat before the rank badge is awarded.
Pass two, by adventure. Which required adventures are not started for most of the den? Those are your next three meetings. The ones most of the den has already done are make-up work for two Scouts, not a den meeting.
Pass three, by Scout. Who is furthest behind, and is it one adventure or is it everything? One adventure is a make-up night. Everything usually means a family that missed six weeks, and that is a phone call, not a plan.
The four questions the report will not answer
The report is a record, not a plan. It is very good at saying what has been signed off and bad at telling you what to do next.
- Which single meeting would close the most open requirements across the whole den.
- Which Scouts would advance if you ran that meeting.
- What the meeting should actually look like: blocks, times, materials.
- Which requirements are stuck because they are done at home with a parent and nobody reported back.
What to do with it on Sunday night
Take the report, find the required adventure with the most open requirements across the den, and plan that. Then look for the two Scouts who missed the week you covered something, and put a make-up chunk in the activity block for them while the rest of the den does the new thing. That is the whole method, and it works whether you do it on paper or in a tool.
Getting it out of Scoutbook Plus without retyping it
Retyping a roster and six months of history is where most leaders give up. DenBuddy uses a Chrome extension, DenBuddy Sync, that reads your den's roster and advancement from your own signed-in Scoutbook Plus session and brings it across. It reads always and writes only when you press Send, and it never sees your Scouting password. When you have recorded a meeting, you can send the approved completions straight back to Scoutbook — after reading every row — or download the CSV and upload it yourself.
More detail on the split: DenBuddy and Scoutbook Plus, the DenBuddy Sync extension, and what the import actually reads. If you want to see your own den's gaps, start there.