Free tool
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.
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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.
Troop proceeds per package is the number that turns a busy booth into money, and it is set by your council rather than by how hard your girls work the table. Once you know it, everything else is traffic and hours. A high traffic grocery entrance on a Saturday morning and a quiet hardware store on a Sunday afternoon can differ by a factor of three in packages per hour, and that difference is the whole argument for being selective about sites.
The card cost line matters more each year as fewer families carry cash. If your council absorbs processing on the official app, enter zero. If your troop runs its own reader, enter your blended cost across all sales, because the fee is charged on the retail price of the packages rather than on the proceeds your troop keeps.
Your result
Packages per shift
90
What one booth moves at the traffic level you entered.
Troop proceeds per shift
$86
The money your troop keeps from two hours at that site.
Season proceeds from booths
$1,539
All booked shifts at the same traffic and terms.
Booth proceeds after card costs
$1,393
What is left once processing is taken off the retail value sold.
These are booth proceeds only, so add door to door and shipped orders separately when you set the troop goal.
Why packages per hour is the number to argue about
Leaders spend a lot of January debating shift length and almost none of it debating site traffic, which is backwards. Doubling a shift from two hours to four does not usually double the packages, because foot traffic is concentrated around store rush hours and the last hour of a long shift is often the slowest of the day. Booking two separate two hour shifts at two good sites beats one four hour shift at a mediocre one.
Get the number honestly by counting one real shift. Have the adult write the running total at each half hour on the back of the shift sheet. Do that at three different sites in the first two weekends and you will have a site ranking that is worth more than any benchmark from another council.
Turning the figure into a booking decision
Once you have proceeds per shift, compare it against what the shift costs your troop in volunteer goodwill. Two adults for two hours plus drive time and setup is roughly six adult hours. If a site returns well under what your better sites return for the same six hours, it belongs at the bottom of the list even if the manager is lovely and says yes every year.
The same figure settles the family quota conversation. Divide your booth proceeds goal by proceeds per shift and you have the number of shifts the season needs, and that number divided by your families is what you ask of each one at the kickoff meeting. A published number that came from arithmetic gets far less pushback than a request that sounds like a guess.
Questions about this calculator
Where do I find our troop proceeds per package?
It comes from your council in the season materials and it can shift depending on the incentive plan your troop chooses. Ask your service unit cookie manager if the paperwork is unclear, and use the figure that applies after your troop opts in or out of the incentive program.
Should I include what the girls earn toward their own goals?
No, keep this to troop proceeds. Rewards, patches and program credits are real motivation but they are not money in the troop account, and mixing them makes the season budget look larger than it is.
Our first weekend was much slower than this. Do I lower the number?
Lower it for that site, not for the season. The first weekend of a season and a mid February weekend with good weather are different animals. Track packages per hour by site and by weekend, then plan the next season from the site ranking rather than a single average.
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.