PayPal Rate Changes

Effective Monday, August 2 at midnight GMT (which is equivalent to 8:00 PM eastern time on Sunday, August 1), PayPal will be implementing new transaction fees for credit card payments.

• For standard on-line payments, the rate will change from 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction to 3.49% + 49 cents per transaction.
• For sites that have verified their 501c3 status with PayPal, the non-profit rate for on-line payments will change from 2.2% + 30 cents to 1.99% + 49 cents.
• For in person payments using the PayPal Here app, the rate will change from 2.7% to 2.2% + 9 cents per transaction.

TroopWebHost has no control over these fees and does not receive any portion of them.  PayPal sets these rates and receives all of the proceeds.

This change has been implemented in several places where TroopWebHost estimates the transaction fee:

• On-Line Payments
• Buy Stuff From Troop
• Public Site For Fundraiser Sales (ScoutSales.org)
• Booth Sales

If your site is configured to support BOTH Square and PayPal, we will use the Square rate to compute the estimated fee.  If the payer chooses to use PayPal, the correct PayPal fee will be filled in when the payment is completed.  This won't change the total amount charged to the payer, but may change the amount paid to the troop.

To avoid confusion, we recommend that you only implement one of these payment methods.  If you are already using both PayPal and Square, it is easy to disable either of them from their respective configuration pages.  Please open a support ticket if you need any help with this.

National Holidays

TroopWebHost now maintains a list of National Holidays that can be imported to your site's calendar.

To view this list, please go to Calendar → National Holidays (for Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts, the path is Events → National Holidays.)

This shows you all of the available holidays.

The Already In Calendar column indicates whether this holiday is already present in your calendar.  This will only be set to YES if an event in your calendar has exactly the same name and date.

Press Copy Holidays For One Year to copy the holidays for a selected year into your calendar.  This will bring up this page.

Before running this function, you must first have an appropriate Event Type that can be assigned to these holidays when they are added to your calendar.  Please go to Site Configuration → Event Types to add a "Holiday" event type, unless you have already done so.  This should be a bare bones event type, with very few options enabled.

Once you have a "Holiday" event type, you can return to the page shown above and select that event type from the drop down list.  Then press the Continue button to copy that year's holidays into your calendar.

When it finishes, the system will display the Maintain Events page.

New Widgets

This update only applies to TroopWebHost sites.  It is not available for Cub Scout and Girl Scout sites.

Organizations that use one TroopWebHost site to manage both a girl troop and boy troop now have two new widgets for displaying their scout leadership:

• Our Scout Leaders (NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLIC PAGES) - Girls Troop shows the current scout leaders in the girls troop
• Our Scout Leaders (NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLIC PAGES) - Boys Troop shows the current scout leaders in the boys troop

These widgets may be placed on the Home page or any custom page.  Be sure to set "Public Access" to "No" when you create the widget.

Last Affirmation Date

This update only applies to TroopWebHost sites.  It is not available for Cub Scout and Girl Scout sites.

The Last Affirmation Date field on the membership record gives you the flexibility to track an event of interest to your troop for each member.  For some troops, this may be the submission of a form affirming their understanding of the troop rules.  For others, it can be the date at which a parent last submitted an annual permission form.

This year, some troops might want to use this field to track the date on which each member completed their Covid vaccination.

For any of these purposes, it would be useful to see this field when viewing the participants for an event.  We just added a new security task, "View Event Participant Last Affirmation Date", which you can assign to any User Role to allow users to view this field when viewing the participants for an event.

Users who are authorized for this task will see the column as shown here:

Send Us Your Questions and Suggestions

Send us a ticket from the My Support Tickets page on your site's Help menu.   This is absolutely the best way to communicate with us!

Or simply contact us at CustomerSupport@TroopWebHost.com.  If you do, please include your troop number and city in your message so we can identify your site.