Camp Planner support

Getting started

Sign up and create your Scout group, then invite the rest of your leader team by email — everyone you invite shares the same camps, roster and settings for that group. Once you're in, create a camp with a name and dates and you're ready to start planning. Group names have to be unique across everyone using Camp Planner, so you'll be asked to pick a different one if yours is already taken; you can rename your group at any time from its Group name setting.

If you have more than one group

Most groups only ever set one up, so if you belong to a single group you go straight into it when you sign in — no list to pick from. If you belong to two or more, you get the list and choose.

To add another group (a second section that keeps its own records, or a District you also help with), click ← All groups on the group's own page. That takes you to the full list, where a New group button sits in the top right. The list also appears on its own once you belong to more than one, so you only need that link the first time.

Being invited to someone else's group counts too — accept the invitation and you'll start seeing the list, with both groups on it.

Free plan & pricing

Camp Planner is free to try with your first camp — create and run it with no time limit and no card details needed. Creating a second camp needs a paid subscription (£20/yr), or £50/yr for the bundle with Quartermaster, Hall Manager and Leader Compliance together. Only your group's owner can subscribe or cancel, from a Billing section on your group's page, paid by Direct Debit via GoCardless. See full pricing for details.

Roster & attendees

Add young people, young leaders and adults to a camp's roster, with their section, patrol/Six/Lodge and date of birth. A parent self-service form lets parents fill in their own child's details and give consent, rather than a leader typing it all in by hand — send the link and the roster fills itself in as parents respond. The People registry (under your group, not a specific camp) lets you reuse a young person's details across multiple camps instead of re-entering them each time — CSV roster import and syncing from OSM both connect to it too, so the same young person is recognised across camps rather than getting a duplicate entry each time.

Not everyone needs to be there for the whole camp — set an arrival and/or departure date on an attendee to record a late arrival, early departure or single-day visit. Leave both blank for the common case (there the whole time). The Overview tab shows a day-by-day headcount once anyone on the roster has one of these dates set.

Capacity & waitlist

Set an optional maximum headcount on a camp. Once it's reached, anyone added afterwards — by a leader or via the parent join form — lands on a waitlist instead of being confirmed outright, shown as its own section on the roster with a "spaces filled" count. Leaders can promote or move someone to the waitlist manually at any time, regardless of the cap.

Parent email addresses

A parent or guardian's email is now required — on the roster for young people, and on the parent and join forms. Adults on a roster don't need one, since they have no parent.

It's what the form link is sent to, and it's also the only thing that recognises a parent when they come back to pay. Without it, someone who set up a Direct Debit for one child is asked for their bank details all over again for the next one. Asking on the form is deliberate: the parent is the authority on their own address, where a leader is typing what they think it is.

Health, dietary & consent

Medical conditions, allergies, medications, dietary needs, emergency contacts and consent choices are visible only to a camp's owners and leaders — never to helpers or viewers — and this is enforced at the database level, not just hidden in the interface. You can clear this data for a whole camp at any time, and each group can set an automatic retention period so it's cleared on its own a set number of days after a camp ends.

Tents

Drag and drop attendees into tents on a simple board, with each tent's capacity shown so you can see at a glance who still needs a space. Works from the keyboard too, not just with a mouse.

A Pairing rules panel lets you keep certain people together or apart — a young person who needs a familiar face nearby, or two who shouldn't share a tent. Break a rule while allocating and you'll see a warning right on the board, naming exactly who and why, updating live as you drag people between tents. Once allocation is done, printable tent tags (one per person, name and tent, ready to cut out) are available from both the Tents tab and the Overview tab's export section.

Duty rota

Set up recurring chores (washing up, fire lighting, and anything else your camp needs doing) and assign a team to each one for each day of the camp.

Menus & shopping list

Plan a menu for each day of the camp, and build a shopping list alongside it — quantities can scale automatically with the number of attendees, so you're not doing that maths by hand.

Kit lists

Track group kit (the tents, cooking equipment and tools you're bringing) separately from what each individual camper needs to pack. The personal kit list you set here doubles as a packing checklist parents can tick off for their own child on their parent-form link — ticks save instantly, and the roster shows how many of each camper's items are packed so far.

If your group also uses Quartermaster, a group-kit item (e.g. "6 large tents") can link to the actual equipment it tracks. If another camp with overlapping dates links the same equipment, both camps show a warning naming each other — so you find out about a double-booking before you're both packing the same tents.

Programme

Lay out the camp's activities day by day. The programme can be exported as a standard calendar (.ics) file, so leaders and parents can see it in their own calendar app.

Risk assessment

The Risk tab starts an assessment from the hazards nearly every Scout camp shares — site features, water, fires, mallets, tools, sleeping arrangements, adults, incidents and the rest. They all start included, because the hazard nobody thought of shouldn't also be the one that never appears. Edit any control to fit your site, add hazards of your own, and remove the ones that genuinely don't apply.

What you save is a snapshot. If we improve a control next month, an assessment you've already signed doesn't change underneath you.

Camp Planner then reads what your camp already knows and puts a note beside the rows it bears on — your kit list has cooking stoves and gas, so the open fires row gets a question about fuel storage; your site plan marks a campfire; your roster is short of the usual ratio for the section. If something your camp is bringing points at a hazard that isn't in the assessment at all, that gets called out above the rows, because that's the one thing your own data can spot that re-reading your list can't.

These are questions, not edits. Nothing is changed for you, and a note you disagree with is a note you ignore — if you removed a hazard deliberately, leave it removed.

Where medical details are involved you'll only ever see a count — “16 people have a medical condition recorded” — never a name or a condition, and only if your role lets you see medical data at all. Helpers and viewers see no medical note rather than a misleading empty one.

Export it on the standard four-column template as either a Word document — for when you've still got site-specific detail to add — or a PDF for sending on and printing, ready to log with your District Commissioner. Both say exactly the same thing, and the last column is left blank on purpose, because that's the one you fill in by hand at camp as things change. It also appears in the printable camp pack.

If your camp has a programme filled in, Camp Planner can read it and suggest hazards the assessment doesn't cover yet. Suggestions arrive as drafts you accept or reject one at a time — nothing is added to your assessment until you say so, and dismissing one stops it coming back. They're written by a language model, which the panel says plainly, so read them properly before adding them. This part needs a paid plan; everything else on this page doesn't.

Adventurous activities are refused, not generated. If your programme mentions climbing or abseiling, aerial runways and rope courses (zip wires, high ropes, Jacob's ladders), water activities, archery or shooting, caving, hillwalking, toboggan runs and snow sports, air activities or motorised activities, Camp Planner tells you it needs a separate assessment from whoever holds the relevant permit — and won't write one. The list grows as real camps turn up activities it didn't know about, so treat it as a safety net rather than the definitive word: if something on your programme needs a permit, it needs one whether or not we spotted it. That warning is free, works without a paid plan, and shows up whether or not you ever ask for suggestions.

The reminder that goes out a week before your camp now mentions the risk assessment too — if you haven't started one, or if the review date you set has passed. A review date falling after the camp isn't mentioned, because there's nothing useful you can do about it while you're packing.

This is a starting point, not a finished assessment. It doesn't check your Nights Away Permit, tell your DC, or replace an activity-specific assessment — climbing, water activities, shooting and the like need their own, from whoever holds the permit. The name on the document is yours, and so is the judgement behind it.

Budget

Track income and expenses against the camp, including per-person costs that scale with headcount automatically. A separate camp fees panel tracks who's paid, and can sync with Online Scout Manager's Finances tab if you use OSM.

Once your group has connected its own GoCardless account (see the "Collect payments" card on your organisation's page), each unpaid attendee gets a Get payment link option in the fees panel — send it to a parent and they pay straight into your group's own bank account, with the attendee marked paid automatically once GoCardless confirms it. Our platform fee of 1%is deducted from each payment, and GoCardless charge their own transaction fee separately. The manual "mark as paid" checkbox still works too, for parents who pay by cash or bank transfer instead — and ticking it no longer overwrites the record of a payment made online.

The parent chooses how to pay. Pay now from your bank is approved in their banking app and clears straight away, and sets up a Direct Debit at the same time so any balance still owing doesn't need authorising again. Set up a Direct Debit is authorised once and collected over about three working days. Either way they never type card details, and the money goes to your group, not to us.

A parent who has already set up a Direct Debit with your group — for an earlier camp, or for another child — is offered a third thing: pay with the Direct Debit they already have. The page names the account ("Barclays account ending 1234") and takes the payment on one click, with no bank details and no trip to GoCardless. If the camp has a deposit and a balance date, they can spread the cost on that same Direct Debit too.

It only appears when we can match them, which needs their email address on the roster or their parent form — see below. If anything has changed, or they'd rather not, the ordinary options are still there underneath.

Because Direct Debit takes days to clear, the fees panel shows what each payment is actually doing rather than just paid or unpaid. Payment processing means it's on its way and there's nothing to chase. Payment failed means it didn't go through and the parent can try again from the same link. Payment failed — being retried automatically means GoCardless is having another go on the day it judges most likely to work, so there's nobody to chase — the parent doesn't need to do anything. Payment charged back means the parent's bank reversed it after it had gone through — the fee goes back to unpaid on its own, so the list stays honest.

Letting parents spread the cost

Set a deposit and a balance due date together on the Budget tab, and parents get a third option when they pay: Spread the cost. They authorise once, and both amounts are then collected automatically on the dates you chose — no second payment link, and nothing for them to remember.

The pay page shows them exactly what will be taken and when before they agree to it, because the second payment happens without asking again. Set a deposit on its own and the balance still works as it always has — a separate payment the parent makes themselves — so nothing changes for existing camps until you add a balance date.

One thing to expect if a camp is close: Direct Debit can't collect for a few working days after it's set up, so a balance date inside that window is pulled forward to the earliest date the bank allows rather than the plan being refused. For two clearly separate collections, leave a few weeks between the deposit and the balance date.

Refunds

Any fee paid online can be refunded from the fees panel — useful when someone drops out, or pays twice by mistake. Open Refund next to the attendee, check the amount (it defaults to everything still refundable, but you can refund part of it), add a reason if it's helpful, and confirm. The money goes back to the account it came from and usually arrives within a few working days.

Two limits are worth knowing about, because both come from GoCardless rather than from us. A payment can't be refunded for seven days after it was collected — if you try, the app tells you the date it becomes possible. And a refund can only be paid out of money GoCardless still holds for your group, so once a payment has been paid out to your bank account it can no longer be refunded this way; you'd need to send it back yourself. The app tells you your available refund balance when that happens.

Once a refund is issued the fee stops counting as paid, so a refunded attendee reappears in your unpaid list — which is usually what you want, but worth expecting.

You also can't remove someone from the roster while they have a payment outstanding or already collected, and the same goes for deleting a whole camp. Camp Planner will tell you who and why. That's deliberate: their payment lives against their record, so deleting them would leave the money with nothing here to attach it to — you'd be unable to see it or refund it, even though GoCardless still holds it. Refund them first, or tick the fee as paid by hand if they settled it another way, and the removal will then go through.

Rather than typing a fee amount in blind, a contribution rules panel can work it out for you from the Budget tab's own itemised costs. Choose whether adults/leaders and young leaders pay the same Standard fee as campers, nothing, just the food cost, or a fixed amount — the suggested Standard fee updates live as you add costs or change rules, and one click applies it. If an adult or young leader's rule works out above £0, they get billed for real — a payment link, a place in the paid/unpaid list — the same as any other attendee, which is new: adults have never been chargeable before.

Messages to parents

A Messages tab on each camp lets you email every parent/guardian on file at once — "bring wellies, forecast is wet", for example — without exporting the roster and using a separate mailer. A parent with two children at the same camp only gets one copy. Past messages stay visible there afterwards.

Weather forecast

If a camp has a location set, its Overview tab shows a daily forecast (temperature, rain chance, condition) for whichever of its dates fall within about two weeks out — forecasts don't exist further ahead than that, so it simply doesn't show for a camp that's further off.

Camp pack & exports

Export any of the roster, tents, duty rota, kit, budget or shopping list as a spreadsheet (CSV), or print the whole lot as a single printable camp pack to take with you.

Connecting Online Scout Manager (optional)

If your group uses OSM, you can connect it under your account settings, then import a camp's dates and attendee list (including medical/consent details, for leaders who already have access to them in OSM) with a single "Sync from OSM" button — so parents who've already given OSM their details aren't asked to enter them twice. Entirely optional — Camp Planner works standalone without it.

A sync also tidies up: anyone no longer attending in OSM is removed from the camp, unless they've returned a parent form or paid online. Those two are kept, and the sync tells you how many — so a roster that doesn't shrink as far as you expected usually means someone has paid and needs refunding before they can come off.