Free tool
What one booth shift is worth to your troop
Enter your own site traffic and council terms and see the proceeds a single shift produces and what the season adds up to.
Free tool, no sign up
How many booth shifts does your case goal need
Work backward from cases to selling hours, shifts and the fair share each family carries this season.
Most troops set a case goal in January and discover in February that nobody counted the adult hours it would take. This planner does that arithmetic first. It converts cases into packages, packages into selling hours at your real site traffic, hours into shifts at your standard shift length, and shifts into the adult slots you have to fill under your supervision rules.
The last figure is the one that decides whether the plan is realistic. If it says each family needs to cover eight shifts, you either need more families, more hours per shift, better sites or a smaller goal. Better to find that out at the kickoff meeting than in week four, when the same three parents have quietly taken every slot on the calendar.
Your result
Packages to sell at booths
3,000
The case goal converted into the packages that cross the table.
Selling hours needed
66.7
Table hours at your average traffic, before drive time and setup.
Booth shifts to book
34
How many slots have to exist on the season calendar.
Shifts per family
4.9
The fair share each family carries if everyone pulls the same weight.
Add roughly an hour of drive time and setup to every shift when you tell parents what the commitment really costs them.
The adult slot is the real constraint
Troops plan around cases and then run out of adults. A booth is not staffed by a family, it is staffed by screened adults in the number your supervision rules require, and a parent who has not completed screening cannot fill that slot no matter how willing she is. Run the screening list against your family count in December, not in February.
This is also why the shifts per family figure climbs so fast. Each shift you add consumes two or three adult slots, so a goal that looks like twenty more cases can quietly mean six more adult commitments. When the number comes back above four or five shifts per family, the honest options are recruiting more screened adults, choosing better sites so fewer hours are needed, or moving the goal.
Publishing the number before the season starts
Take the shifts per family figure to the kickoff meeting and put it on one slide with the arithmetic behind it. Families accept a number that came from the case goal they agreed to far more readily than a request that arrives by text in week three. It also gives the parent who genuinely cannot work weekends a clear way to contribute somewhere else, rather than quietly disappearing.
Then track against it publicly. A simple count of shifts covered per family, visible to everyone, is the single most effective fix for the pattern where three parents work half the season. Nobody wants to be the family at the bottom of a list they agreed to in January.
Questions about this calculator
Should youth count toward the adults per shift number?
No. Girls at the booth are the point of the exercise, but they do not satisfy the supervision requirement. Enter only screened adults here, and check your council rule on the minimum, since some require two unrelated adults rather than simply two.
What if we cannot book enough booths for the shifts this says we need?
Then site availability is your real constraint and the case goal has to come down or the mix has to change. Many troops close the gap with door to door orders and shipped orders rather than by adding booth hours nobody can staff.
Does this account for cases we return?
It plans the cases you intend to sell at booths. If your council runs consignment and you expect to return some, plan the booths against what you realistically expect to sell, then treat unsold cases as a separate return decision before the invoice deadline.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The booth weekend runbook
Every step a cookie manager has to hit from two weeks out to the final deposit, in the order the weekend actually happens.
Hold that figure through the booth weekends
The number above is only as good as what gets written down between now and the council invoice deadline. TroopBooth records what each booth shift actually moved and which family was holding the cases, so next January's site ranking comes from counted weekends instead of memory. A demo runs about half an hour and we will use your own sites and shift lengths.