Volunteer hours — logging, corrections, and reports by program

VolunteerBadge lets your volunteers log their own service hoursright from their volunteer portal — you simply review and approve. No spreadsheets, no chasing people for their hours. It's a free perk, and it takes about 30 seconds to turn on.

Step 1 — Turn on volunteer hours tracking

1. Go to Settings → Organization.
2. Scroll to the Volunteer profile section.
3. Turn on “Volunteer hours tracking” (in some accounts this toggle still reads “Show ‘Hours & grants’ on volunteer profiles” — it's the same switch).
4. Click Save organization.

Step 2 — How volunteers log hours

From their portal (volunteerbadge.com/badge), the volunteer clicks Log hours on your organization, enters the date, hours, and an optional note about what they did, and hits Submit for approval. The entry is sent to you — it doesn't count until you approve it.

Step 3 — Review & approve

Every submission shows up under Manage → Hours as Pending approval (you also get an in-app notification). Click Approve to make it a verified hour, or Rejectif something's off. Verified hours roll into your reports, certificates of service, and grant documentation.

The table shows the latest 200 entries. Verified hours and Pending approval count the whole organization, including older rows. Click a column heading — Date, Volunteer, Hours, Program, Notes, or Status — to sort those rows. Click it again to reverse the order. The table opens with the newest date first. After you add at least one person served, a Person served column appears and sorts the same way.

Export CSV downloads every hour entry, not only the 200 on screen, as a spreadsheet with date, volunteer, hours, program, notes, status, how it was logged, an entry id, and person served. Person served is blank when an entry has none. Use it when you want to sort or total the full list yourself. The entry id is the row's permanent identifier.

Correcting an entry

Every row in Manage → Hours has an Edit link in the Actions column — pending, verified, or rejected. You can change the date, hours, program, person served (once your organization uses that list), and notes, then click Save changes. The totals and your reports update straight away.

Each edit is written to that entry's history with both the old and the new values, so correcting a typo never costs you the audit trail a funder or auditor may ask for.

Reporting by program

A program is how you group hours for reporting — Youth Mentoring, Food Pantry, Saturday Tutoring. Create them under Manage → Hours → Add program, or add one without leaving the drawer while you're logging hours. Pick the program on each entry, or set it later with Edit.

Then go to Impact & Funding → Reports → Volunteer impact report. Both the PDF and the summary CSV include an Hours by program breakdown — you do not have to run anything separately to get it. Set a From and To date to cover a grant period, and use the Program picker to report on a single program on its own. Leaving it on All programs keeps the full breakdown.

Two things worth knowing about those numbers: only verified hours are counted, so anything still pending your approval will not appear; and hours logged with no program are grouped under Unassigned.

Export entries CSV on that same card is the row-by-row list: date, volunteer, hours, program, notes, status, and how the entry was logged. It uses the From, To, and Program choices above it, and the Person served choice once your organization has added at least one person. Leave the dates empty to include every entry. Pending and rejected rows are in that file, marked with their status, along with an entry id and person served. The PDF and the summary CSV still count verified hours only.

Person served

Some organizations log hours against the person who received the service — a friendly visit, a student, a meal recipient. That person is not the volunteer, and not someone signing a waiver under Screen & Protect. VolunteerBadge stores the name only. It does not ask for an email, phone, or address, and it does not add them to your volunteer roster.

If you never need this, leave it alone. You will not see a person dropdown, a Person served column, or a fourth summary card. To start, open Manage → Hours and choose Add person served, or add a name while you are logging hours. After the first name is saved, the People served card counts the names on your list (the same way Programs counts programs), and log, bulk log, and edit let you pick one.

Volunteers logging their own hours are not asked for a person served. A leader sets it when logging, bulk logging, or editing. On Impact & Funding → Reports, the Person served picker appears once you have at least one name. The PDF and summary CSV then include how many distinct people had verified hours in the period, plus hours by person. Hours with no person are left out of that count. They still count in the program totals. Organizations that never add a person keep the same program report as before. These names stay on your organization's hours and reports. They are not added to network reports or public impact pages.

Not tracking hours at all? You can leave this off (or turn it back off anytime) — see Hide the Hours & grants section.