Human services toolkit
For pantries, meal programs, delivery routes and community sites. Every one of these sits at a counter, a door or a signing table where somebody decides something in a hurry — and the useful part is not the total at the bottom. It is the one item the file refuses to clear.
Six workbooks. No account, no email gate, no watermark.
Two things separate a workbook that helps from one that just stores. The first is what it does at the moment of the decision, when there is a line at the door and no time to look anything up. The second is what it will not let you forget once everyone has gone home.
A formula answers “have they been this month?” instead of somebody remembering. The rule is yours — 30 days, 14, or none at all — and it is applied identically to every household.
Every visit earlier than your rule is on the row, flagged at the time. Not as a refusal: pantries make exceptions constantly and for good reasons. The flag exists so an exception is a decision somebody made rather than an inconsistency nobody noticed.
Your safe range, entered once, tested against every reading as it goes in. The workbook ships no ranges of its own — those come from a food safety plan and a health department, not from a download.
An out-of-range reading with no corrective action recorded stays flagged as the finding it is. Recording the reading was never the response; what happened in the next ten minutes was.
Planned, produced and served are three different numbers, recorded as three. Most meal logs collapse them into one and lose the only comparison that matters.
RAN SHORT counts the services where somebody was turned away. Waste reporting alone hides it — a kitchen that never wastes a portion is usually a kitchen that runs out.
Three questions about what a person actually does decide their training level — not their job title, and not who happened to be in the room at orientation.
WRONG LEVEL outranks everything else on the register. Somebody given the shorter training and then put on the sign-in table is the hardest thing in the file to explain to a monitor.
The first cell asks whose insurance responds when a volunteer drives their own car — in writing, from your insurer — because in most cases it is theirs, and they are entitled to know that before they take a route.
A door nobody answered, with nobody recorded as told, stays open in red. That is the event the route exists to catch, and the file makes the gap visible tomorrow morning rather than much later.
Every row starts at NOT VALID and stays there until somebody confirmed a photo ID and signed. Not the volunteer’s signature — the coordinator’s.
One number says how many people can actually work on opening day. It is almost always smaller than the roster, and the rest of the tab explains why.
Each downloads as a branded .xlsx with live formulas. Every interval, threshold, safe range and requirement is a cell you fill in from your own agreement.
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.
That restriction exists for a reason that is easy to lose behind the acronyms. Information identifying someone who is fleeing violence, sitting in a file that can be emailed, copied, synced and opened by anyone who ends up with it, is a safety problem first and a compliance problem second.
More generally: where these files touch information about people asking for help, four decisions are worth making before the file exists rather than after — 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 needs. Every workbook here says this on its own first sheet, because the file outlives the page it came from.
None of these six is a screening product. Two of them hold a screening date among other things, and a screening date is only true on the day it was run.
Where our own work is genuinely relevant is narrower than the whole sector. It is the doorstep. A delivery volunteer is frequently the only person who will see a frail or isolated adult that day, alone, inside their home, with nobody else present — which is a setting where identity matters more than usual, and where a name-only check clears a name rather than a person.
VolunteerBadge screens volunteers for $5 per adult with photo-ID and biometric verification, and re-screens automatically on a schedule you set. It is deliberately not one of the six above.
Screening requirements in care settingsNo, and this is the one place we will be blunt rather than careful. 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 that meets the applicable data, privacy and security standards. A spreadsheet is not one and cannot be made into one. The reason is not paperwork: personally identifying information about someone fleeing violence, in a file that can be emailed, copied and opened by anyone who has it, is a safety problem before it is a compliance problem. Every workbook here that can hold client information says this on its own first sheet.
Only if your program says they do. None of these is an official form, and none should ever be submitted in place of one. Eligibility rules, self-declaration requirements, visit limits, training requirements, retention periods and report formats are set by your program, your state distributing agency and your partner food bank — and they genuinely differ between them, which is why every such value in these workbooks is a cell you fill in rather than a number we chose.
Because supplying one would be making a food safety decision for a program we have never seen, and somebody would use it. Safe ranges, holding times, corrective actions and disposal decisions come from your own food safety plan and your local health department. What the workbook does instead is the part that actually shows up at an inspection: it tests every reading against the range you entered, and it will not let an out-of-range reading sit there without a corrective action recorded beside it.
It asks three questions about the role: does this person interact with applicants and participants, do they handle personal information, and do they determine eligibility. Any yes marks them FULL; all three no marks them Limited. That is the shape the requirement takes in food assistance programs — depth of training follows what somebody does, not their title — but the exact definitions, the curriculum and what counts as delivery belong to your state agency and partner food bank. If the register says a role is not described yet, that is not a failure; it means it has no basis to say what that person needs.
Ask your insurer, get the answer in writing, and tell your drivers. Very often the answer is that they are not — in a personal vehicle it is normally the volunteer’s own auto policy that responds, and many organizations carry nothing that covers a volunteer driver at all. People deliver meals for years believing otherwise. The workbook makes that the first cell on the settings tab rather than a footnote, and it sets no liability minimum of its own, because that figure comes from your insurer or your funder.
They are different things and both matter for drivers. A driving record is about the driving; a background check is about the person. Worth knowing: when you obtain someone’s driving record to decide whether they may volunteer, that request can fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and under state law that is often stricter — which governs the disclosure you must give, the authorization you must obtain, and what you must do before turning someone down because of what it said. Confirm your obligations before you order one.
Free, no account, no email gate, no watermark. We build background-check software and sell that separately. None of these six is a screening product — take all six and never speak to us again.
Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Drive and open with Sheets. Every formula carries over, and there are deliberately no array formulas anywhere in the set — they degrade silently in older versions of Excel, which is the worst possible failure mode for a file somebody is relying on.
The hardest editorial decision across this set was how much to leave blank. Almost every value that would have made these workbooks feel finished — a safe temperature range, a visit limit, a liability minimum, a training interval, a retention period — is one that differs between programs and that we have no business choosing for an organization we have never seen. A number we invented would be trusted, and it would be wrong somewhere.
So what is left is arithmetic, a lot of empty cells, and one stubborn flag per file. If something here is wrong, or a blank should have been filled, tell us at support@volunteerbadge.com.
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