Jimenez Julien, builder and maintainer of TroopBooth
He writes the code, answers the support mail and sits on the setup calls with troop leaders in January.
Jimenez Julien is the founder of MLJ, SASU and the publication director for TroopBooth. He builds a small number of narrow software products for people who run operations by hand, and youth fundraising is the one he has spent the most field time on.
Why TroopBooth exists
The first version of this product was a spreadsheet built for one troop in the winter of 2022. A friend who leads a troop of twenty six girls asked whether there was any way to stop losing track of cases, and she showed me the binder she was using: a printed roster, a photocopied booth calendar with names penciled into time blocks, and a manila envelope of receipts, checks and payment app screenshots. She had personally absorbed just over two hundred dollars the previous season because she could not reconstruct who had picked up what. She was not disorganized. She was running a distribution operation with eleven part time volunteers, no signatures and no system, in six weeks, on top of a full time job.
What struck me was how badly the available tools fit the actual shape of the work. The council systems handle ordering and invoicing, which is what a council needs. They do not handle the middle of the season, where cases move between a leader's garage, a booth table and a family's back seat, and where money arrives in five different forms from people who all know each other socially. That gap is where the volunteer's evenings disappear, and it is the only thing TroopBooth tries to solve.
I spent the following two seasons doing ride alongs. I stood at storefront booths in three states, helped carry cases, watched cash boxes get counted on tailgates in the cold, and sat at kitchen tables while leaders closed out their books. Almost every design decision in the product came out of those afternoons rather than out of a feature list. The signature on pickup exists because I watched two adults try to remember a Tuesday. The separate booth inventory ledger exists because a troop in Tacoma lost four cases in the seam between a girl's order and a storefront shift. The parent balance sheet exists because the hardest part of the job turned out not to be logistics at all, it was asking a neighbor for money.
Experience and expertise
I have been building software professionally since 2011, mostly operational tools: inventory, scheduling and reconciliation systems for organizations that are too small for enterprise software and too complicated for a notebook. That is a narrow specialty and it maps almost exactly onto a troop fundraising season, which is inventory, scheduling and reconciliation compressed into eight weeks and staffed entirely by volunteers.
- Fifteen years of building scheduling and stock reconciliation systems for small operators.
- Three fundraising seasons spent in the field with troop leaders, cookie chairs and service unit managers in Illinois, Washington and Arizona.
- Direct work with 1,340 booth seasons closed on TroopBooth, including every support ticket raised during them.
- Council export formats maintained and revised every autumn as the paperwork changes.
How this product is built and maintained
TroopBooth is built and supported by MLJ, SASU, a company I own outright. There are no outside investors asking for growth at the expense of the people using it, which is why the pricing is a volunteer budget number and why you can switch the subscription off in April without a phone call.
Development follows the season. Structural changes ship between May and November, when no troop is mid fundraiser. From December through April the only changes that go out are fixes and council format updates, because a leader in the middle of booth weekend should never open the app and find a button somewhere new. Every release is tested against real season data from consenting troops with names removed.
Editorially, the standard on this site is simple: every number published here comes from the product's own records or from documented conversations with leaders, and any figure I cannot source gets cut. The testimonials are from named volunteers who reviewed and approved their own quotes. Pricing on the pricing table is the price you pay. If a claim on this site ever turns out to be wrong, write to me and it gets corrected the same week.
What I am accountable for: the money math being right, the data staying in the United States and out of any advertising system, support answered within one business day during season, and an export of your entire season available at any moment without asking me for it. If any of those slip, that is on me personally, not on a support queue.
Published articles
These are the nine articles I have written for Booth Season, the TroopBooth magazine for volunteer leaders running a youth fundraising season.
- How do I set up a booth sale permit and site agreement before our first weekend?
- What is the real difference between council issued inventory and consignment for our troop?
- Which money handling mistakes cost troops the most at the end of a season?
- What do child protection and volunteer screening rules require of us at a public booth?
- How did one troop clear four hundred cases in three weekends without burning out parents?
- Where is youth fundraising heading as fewer families carry cash to a booth?
- What should be in my booth kit box before I load the car on Saturday morning?
- How much does a two hour booth shift actually bring in for our troop?
- What actually happens during a cold weekend booth shift outside a grocery store?
Open the Booth Season magazine
Contact the author
Email reaches me directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. During booth season I answer most messages the same evening, including weekends, because that is when the problems happen. If you would rather talk it through, the request form books twenty five minutes with me and no one else.