Six free Excel workbooks for food pantries, soup kitchens and community meal programs, home-delivery and senior transport routes, and free tax preparation sites. No account, no email gate. Find them on the hub at volunteerbadge.com/human-services-toolkit or under Human Services Toolkit on volunteerbadge.com/tools.
Read this before putting a name in any of them
A spreadsheet is not a comparable database. If you are a victim service provider receiving funding that prohibits entering client-level data into HMIS, you are required to use a comparable database meeting the applicable data, privacy and security standards. None of these workbooks is one and none can be made into one. Do not record client-level information about survivors in any of them.
More generally, where a file holds information about people asking for help, decide four things before the file exists: where it lives, who can open it, how long you keep it, and how it is destroyed. Use a household or client reference instead of a name wherever your program allows, and record no more than the decision in front of you actually requires.
The six workbooks
- Food Pantry Distribution & Visit Log — a visit-frequency rule is a policy, not a law, and differs by program, state agency and partner food bank. You enter yours (or 0 for no limit) and the workbook applies it identically to every household, flagging a too-soon visit on the row at the time. It reads earlier than your rule, never “ineligible” — programs make exceptions for good reasons, and the flag exists so an exception is a visible decision rather than an inconsistency.
- Cold Chain & Food Safety Log — ships no safe ranges. Those come from your food safety plan and your health department. What it does is flag an out-of-range reading with no corrective action recorded, and keep flagging it until somebody writes what was done.
- Community Meal Service Log — planned, produced and served kept as three separate numbers, with volunteer hours alongside. Produced minus served is waste; planned minus produced is people, and RAN SHORT counts the services where somebody who came did not eat.
- Food Program Civil Rights & Training Register — three questions about what a person actually does (contact with applicants and participants, handles personal information, determines eligibility) derive whether they need full or limited training. Somebody given the shorter training while doing the deeper job reads WRONG LEVEL, above every other status. Keep-until dates are computed from your fiscal year end, because retention in this sector is usually expressed as years plus the current fiscal year.
- Volunteer Driver Eligibility & Route Log — the first settings cell asks whether your insurance covers a volunteer driving their own car. In a personal vehicle it is normally the volunteer’s own auto policy that responds, and many organizations carry nothing for volunteer drivers at all — ask your insurer in writing and tell your drivers. Licence, insurance and driving-record re-check are tested worst-first against minimums you set. A no-answer door with nobody recorded as told stays open in red.
- Free Tax Site Volunteer Certification Tracker — a volunteer standards of conduct agreement is not valid on the volunteer’s signature alone; it becomes valid when a site coordinator, sponsoring partner, instructor or IRS contact has confirmed their identity against a government-issued photo ID and signed it. Every row starts NOT VALID and stays there until both the confirming name and the counter-signature date exist.
What arrives empty, and why
Safe temperature ranges, visit-frequency limits, liability minimums, re-training intervals, driving-record standards and retention periods all ship blank. Each is set by a food safety plan, a health department, an insurer, a funder, a state distributing agency or a partner food bank, and they genuinely differ between them. A number we chose would be trusted and would be wrong somewhere, which is worse than a blank somebody has to fill in from their own agreement.
No column for a licence or policy number
The driver workbook deliberately has nowhere to put either. Neither changes a decision — you need to know the licence is valid, the cover is in force and somebody looked, all of which are dates and outcomes. The numbers add a great deal to what is lost if the file is emailed to the wrong person. If a funder demands them, keep them somewhere access-controlled and put a reference here.
Related: a driving record obtained to decide whether somebody may volunteer can be a consumer report, in which case the FCRA and often stricter state law govern the disclosure, the authorization, and what you must do before turning someone down. Confirm your obligations before ordering one.
Disclaimers
Each download ends with a Terms & Disclaimer tab. VolunteerBadge and ScreenForge Labs, LLC are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, any state distributing agency, any food bank or partner network, or the Internal Revenue Service. None of these is an official form and none should be submitted in place of one. A status in any of them reflects only what has been typed in: nothing here certifies a volunteer, approves anyone to prepare returns, makes food safe, or establishes that a site met any requirement.
Format
Every workbook is a branded .xlsx with live formulas and works in Excel, Google Sheets (upload to Drive and open with Sheets), Numbers and LibreOffice. There are deliberately no array formulas anywhere in the set. Each has a Settings tab holding your own values, so changing a rule updates every status at once.