Scoutworks Features
AI Assistance
AI that drafts your term programme, emails and risk assessments and reads your receipts — with no member records sent and a leader approving every word.
Plan a Term With AI
Open a plan in the Programme Planner, choose Plan with AI, and tell it anything it should know about your section — "our hall has no cooker", "week 6 is a campfire in the woods". It drafts a title, leader notes and a set of activities for each night, tagged with the badge requirements they work towards. Fill only the empty weeks, redo the whole term, or pick the nights that did not land. Programme planning with AI is in beta.
- Fill the empty weeks, plan the whole term, or pick individual nights to redo
- Activities are tagged with requirements from your badge goal — any requirement the AI invents is thrown away
- Leader notes cover the aim of the night, what to prepare, and safety points
- Each night is sized to your usual meeting length, with a short kit list on each activity
- Drafts behave like any other planner activity — edit, reorder, swap or delete them
- Badge coverage updates as the term fills, so you can see what the term now covers
- Nothing reaches parents until you publish the term yourself
- See Planning → Programme Planner for everything the planner does without AI
The Writing Bar in the Email Composer
The email to parents is usually the last job of the evening, and it is the one everybody reads. The writing bar sits in the composer and offers five things: write a draft from a sentence, polish what you wrote, check it before you send, shorten it, or change its tone. Every change lands in the composer as an ordinary draft, and you still press Send. The writing bar is in beta.
- Write a draft — describe the email you want in a sentence and get a first draft
- Polish — tightens the writing and fixes spelling and grammar, keeping your meaning and your voice
- Check before sending — flags a reply request with no date, a cost with no way to pay, kit with no list, nobody named to ask, or anything that contradicts the linked event
- Check never edits a word of your message — it has no way to
- Shorten, or change the tone to warmer or more formal
- Merge fields such as a parent's first name come back exactly as you wrote them
- Undo or Keep after every change, and as many rounds as you like
Risk Assessment Suggestions Grounded in POR
Building a risk assessment, Scoutworks can propose hazards and control measures for the activity you are assessing. Each request pulls in the parts of the Policy, Organisation and Rules that fit the activity, so the suggestions reflect what The Scouts expect rather than a generic safety checklist. You are still the safety person: every suggestion is yours to accept, edit or ignore, and nothing saves until you say so.
- Hazards and control measures that draw on the relevant parts of POR, not a generic template
- Event details — dates, location, sections, numbers — pre-fill when you build from an event
- What is sent: the event's title, description, date, location, sections and head count — never who is going
- Every suggestion needs a leader's review — assessments are never generated or signed off on their own
- The trustee Strategic Risk Register offers the same kind of suggestions for group-level risks
- Available to every group, with no beta opt-in needed
- See Planning → Risk Assessment Wizard for the rest of the wizard
Receipt Scanning on Expense Claims
Typing the shop, date and total off a crumpled till receipt is the slowest part of an expense claim. Add a photo or PDF of the receipt to a claim line and Scoutworks reads it and fills in whichever of those fields you left blank. It never overwrites what you typed, and if it cannot read something, it leaves that field for you. A scan never stops you submitting a claim.
- Fills in the shop, date and total from a photo or PDF
- Filled fields are marked "From receipt" so you can check them, and you can change anything
- Suggests the category your group used last time for the same shop
- Warns you when the same receipt is already on another claim
- A PDF with a text layer is read on our own servers, with no AI call at all
- Receipt scans have their own allowance of 500 a month, so they never use up your other AI generations
- Available to every group, with nothing to switch on
Bring Your Own AI Provider
If your group would rather decide which company processes its activity data, or wants AI without a monthly limit, a group admin can connect the group's own AI account in Settings → Integrations. Every AI feature then runs on that account. Leaders notice no difference — the features look and behave the same; only the account behind them changes. Bring your own provider is in beta.
- Choose OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini) or xAI (Grok), and pick the model from a short list
- Verify before save — Scoutworks makes a test request with your key and model, and stores nothing if the provider rejects it
- Your key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and unlocked only on our servers at the moment a feature runs
- The key is never sent back to your browser; settings show only its last four characters
- If your key stops working, AI pauses and every group admin is notified — we never quietly reroute your data back to our provider
- Receipt scanning needs a model that can read photos; if yours cannot, leaders are told and type the details themselves
- Change the provider, model or key, or remove it and return to the Scoutworks default, at any time
- Group Admins only — no other role can see or change it
What Is Sent, and What Never Is
The honest version, because it is the first thing a cautious group admin asks. AI features receive the job in front of them and nothing from your members' records. A term plan sends your section's age group, meeting length, venue name, term dates, badge requirements and your notes. A risk assessment sends the event details you entered. An email sends your subject, your message and the linked event. A receipt sends the photo.
- No young person's record — name, address, date of birth, medical or dietary information — is ever sent
- Notes and event text are scrubbed first: full names such as "Sam Taylor", email addresses, UK phone numbers and street addresses are replaced before sending
- The scrub is simple: "Sam's mum is a chef" would go as written, so keep children's names out of notes
- The writing bar sends your email as you wrote it, and the audience as a type — parents, leaders or the waiting list — never their names
- An AI feature runs only when a leader acts: pressing a button, or attaching a receipt photo to a claim
- Your group's data is not used to train anyone's model — we use paid API tiers only
- The AI providers behind the Scoutworks default are listed in our privacy policy with every other sub-processor
- Connect your own key and that provider becomes your group's own choice, appointed by you
Included Generations, or No Limit at All
On the Scoutworks provider, each group gets 100 successful generations a month for term planning, emails and risk suggestions, plus 500 receipt scans, all included in the £150 annual price. Settings shows how many you have used and the date the count resets. Connect your own AI account and there is no Scoutworks cap at all — you pay your provider directly for what you use.
- 100 generations a month on the Scoutworks provider, included in the price
- 500 receipt scans a month on top, counted separately
- Only successful generations count — a failed or cancelled run does not
- Settings shows how many you have used this month and the date the count resets
- Groups on their own key are never capped by us
- No per-leader AI seat, no credit packs, no upsell
Frequently asked questions
Keep exploring
More features to discover
Other ways Scoutworks helps your group run smoothly.