Track volunteer hours toward funder requirements

Grants often ask you to show volunteer time as a match or an outcome. NestPoint's Service Hours module is where you record that time, approve it, and total it up by the categories your funder cares about. A little setup up front makes the report at the end almost automatic.

Set up roles that match your funder's categories

Before you log anything, decide how hours should group. In Service Hours under Resources, set up the roles people serve in — “Meal prep,” “Trip chaperone,” “Front desk.” Each role has a Report category field where you enter the funder's bucket name, and a Counts as volunteer time switch that decides whether those hours land in your volunteer totals.

Add the people who serve

Volunteers live in their own list, so they don't have to be members. Under Resources, add each person and mark what they are — Volunteer, Staff, Board, Intern, and so on. That label lets you pull volunteer hours apart from staff hours later. If a volunteer is also a member, you can link the two records so their history sits together.

Log the hours

Choose Log hours, pick the Person and the Role, and record the time — either a Service date with a Duration in minutes, or a start and end if you'd rather clock it. Add Notes for anything worth remembering, and if the service tied to a specific program you can point Related work at that activity or trip for context.

When a whole group served together — a Saturday cleanup, a holiday meal — use Batch entry to log the same role, date, and hours for everyone at once instead of one at a time.

Approve before it counts

A new entry usually starts as Pending and doesn't count toward any total until someone reviews it. In the Ledger, a reviewer chooses Approve to make it final or Reject with a reason. Only Approved hours reach your reports — pending, rejected, corrected, and voided entries are left out, so what you hand a funder is the vetted number.

Pull the report for your funder

Open the Reports tab in Service Hours. Volunteer hours summary gives you approved volunteer time for a period, Service hours by role breaks it out by the categories you set up, and Service hours by person shows who served the most. Set the date range to your grant period, filter by role, center, or person kind if you need to, and download the result as a CSV — or a PDF from the reporting hub.

If you've set a volunteer hourly value in settings, the summaries also estimate what those hours are worth — handy for an in-kind match line. It's a planning figure for your reports, not payroll.