Youth & education toolkit
Every program reports a total. Almost none can compute the number underneath it.
Free workbooks for mentoring, tutoring, after-school and school volunteering. Built around the distinction that decides whether the totals mean anything.
Six workbooks. No account, no email gate, no watermark.
Reported: 100 hours
Spread thin across forty students
Also reported: 100 hours
Concentrated on twelve
The workbooks
Each downloads as a branded .xlsx that keeps calculating after you open it. Start with whichever job is on fire.
Mentor Match Tracker
Contact recency the program cannot fake, and the closure tab nobody builds.
Attendance Tracker
Finds the students a few days short of counting — while you can still reach them.
Tutoring Log
Hours are easy to count. Dosage is what predicts whether it worked.
Clearance Tracker
Works backwards from the trip date and says who will not be cleared in time.
Financial Review
The independence test first, then the 21 steps, then the findings.
Service Hours Tracker
Counts verified hours separately from claimed ones.
What you are usually asked to pay for this
Worth being specific, because the pricing in this sector is quietly aggressive for organizations that are often running on a single grant. Dedicated mentoring and volunteer platforms typically price one of three ways: per participant as an annual seat fee, per program as a flat fee per cohort, or an enterprise annual licence. At the small end that lands around $25 to $75 a month tiered by volunteer count; mid-market volunteer platforms commonly sit near $100 to $140 a month, or roughly $1,200 a year billed annually.
For a mentoring program with a hundred matches, or an after-school site tracking attendance for one funder, a meaningful share of that spend buys a structured way to hold records you could hold in a spreadsheet. Which is not an argument that the platforms are worthless — above a few hundred participants they clearly earn it, and automated matching, participant logins and integrated surveys are real things a file cannot do.
It is an argument that a twenty-match program should not be paying a seat fee to know when a match last met. That is a formula. Here it is.
Pricing figures are indicative ranges gathered from published vendor pricing and software directories in September 2026. Vendors change pricing and many offer nonprofit discounts — check current rates before making a decision either way.
Five totals, and what each one is hiding
The left column is what almost every youth program can produce on demand. The right column is what determines whether the left column means anything — and every one of them is a formula, which is why these workbooks exist.
When each number is still worth computing
Most of what goes wrong in a youth program is visible months before anyone names it, and always in a number nobody was looking at yet.
01 · Before the program year
Write down your own numbers first
Your rescreening interval, your contact interval, your attendance threshold, your clearance lead times, your target tutoring dose. Every workbook here asks for these rather than assuming them, and the exercise of answering them is worth more than the spreadsheets. A program that cannot say what its contact interval is does not have one.
Mentor Match & Closure Tracker02 · First six weeks
Watch contact frequency, not enrollment
Enrollment is a number that only goes up and tells you nothing. The matches and pairings that fail almost always show it early as thinning contact, and week six is when it is still cheap to fix. This is the single highest-value habit in the whole toolkit.
03 · Mid-year
Find the students who are close to counting
Whatever threshold your funder uses, run it in the middle of the year and work the list of students who are a few days short. This is the only point at which the number is still yours to change, and it is the difference between reporting an outcome and reporting an attendance figure.
Attendance Tracker04 · Before every trip
Work backwards from the date, not forwards from the list
Clearance has a lead time. A chaperone list assembled three weeks before a trip that needs six weeks of processing is a list of people who will not be going. The clearance workbook computes an apply-by date for every event and tells you, per person, who will not make it and why.
Clearance & Chaperone Readiness05 · Closure
End matches deliberately
An abrupt, unexplained ending can leave a young person worse off than no match at all. Record closure like the event it is — planned or unplanned, who initiated it, and whether anyone actually spoke to the young person.
Closure logBefore you type a child’s name into any of these
A spreadsheet of students’ names, grades, attendance and assessment scores is not a neutral working file. Records you receive from a school can be protected education records under FERPA, and your state may add student-privacy obligations of its own. Small programs are routinely handed rosters by a partner school without anyone explaining what came with them.
Practically, that means deciding — before the file exists, not after — where it lives, who can open it, how long you keep it, and who you are allowed to show it to. A shared Drive folder that every volunteer can reach is the most common way this goes wrong, and it goes wrong silently.
Every workbook here that holds student data says so on the sheet itself rather than only on this page, because the file outlives the page it came from. None of this is legal advice, and if you hold records from a school, ask that school what their agreement with you requires.
The one date these workbooks cannot keep current for you
The clearance tracker and the mentor and tutor workbooks all hold a screening date, and every one of them is only true on the day it was run. A mentor cleared in 2024 and still matched in 2026 has a two-year-old check and a spreadsheet cell that says so in the same confident black text as a check run last week.
These files work perfectly well if you run checks somewhere else and keep the dates by hand — they are registers, and you owe us nothing. But if you would rather the dates maintained themselves, VolunteerBadge screens mentors, tutors, chaperones and program volunteers for $5 per adult — a national criminal search across county, state and federal records, sex-offender registries in all 50 states, and photo-ID plus biometric verification, because a name-only check clears a name rather than a person. Automatic rescreening on a schedule you set, no per-seat fee and no contract.
What a check does and does not catchQuestions program directors ask
Are these really free, and what is the catch?
They are free, there is no account, no email gate and no watermark, and the files do not phone home. We build background-check software, so one of the six workbooks touches something we sell — the clearance tracker records dates that a screening service can keep current for you. The other five have nothing to do with our product. The catch, such as it is, is that we would like you to remember who gave them to you.
Do they work in Google Sheets?
Yes. Upload the .xlsx to Google Drive and open it with Sheets. The formulas used here — COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, MAXIFS, VLOOKUP, EDATE — all have Sheets equivalents that carry over. Conditional formatting usually survives; if a colour rule does not come through, the underlying status text still does, which is the part that matters.
Why do the workbooks make me enter my own thresholds instead of filling them in?
Because they differ by funder, by state, by district and by year, and a template that ships with last year’s number produces confident wrong answers. Where a widely used default exists we name it in the settings note and say where it comes from — the federal 21st CCLC regular-attendee threshold, for example — but it arrives as a value you can change rather than a rule we assert over your award terms.
Is the mentoring workbook based on a published standard?
No, and we are careful about this. VolunteerBadge is not affiliated with MENTOR or any mentoring standards body, the workbook reproduces no published benchmark, and using it does not mean a program meets any standard. It reflects the general shape of records a mentoring program keeps — mentors, mentees, matches, contact, support and closure. If you work to a published framework, get the current material from its publisher and map it yourself.
Can I put student names in these files?
You can, and you should read the FERPA section on this page before you do. Records you receive from a school may be protected education records, your state may add its own student-privacy rules, and a spreadsheet of children’s names and test scores in a shared Drive folder is a real exposure. Every workbook that holds student data carries this warning on the sheet itself, not just here.
Is the PTO financial review an audit?
No. It supports an internal review carried out by your own volunteers, and it is not an audit, review or compilation as an accountant uses those words. Organizations above certain revenue thresholds may be required to engage a licensed professional — what applies to you is set by your bylaws, your state and your national affiliate, and confirming it is your job, not the workbook’s.
Can I edit them, rename them, or strip our branding?
Edit and adapt them however you like — they are yours once downloaded. We would rather you left the footer on so the next coordinator can find where it came from, but nothing stops you removing it. Do not resell them.
We build background-check software. One of these six workbooks touches that, and we have tried to be honest on the screening page about what a check does and does not catch. The other five exist because youth program directors keep rebuilding the same spreadsheets every August, and because a company that wants to be useful to this sector should be useful before it asks for anything.
If something here is wrong, or your program does a thing these files cannot handle, tell us at support@volunteerbadge.com. Most of what these workbooks do came from someone pointing out what the previous version got wrong.
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