Track volunteer hours toward funder requirements

Grants often ask you to show volunteer time as a match or an outcome. Service Hours is where you record that time, approve it, and total it up. A little setup up front saves you from adding hours by hand later.

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, such as “Meal prep,” “Trip chaperone,” or “Front desk.” Each role has a Report category field for your own label, 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 is what the volunteer and staff summaries sort people by. 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 time. 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, such as a Saturday cleanup or 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 Needs approval and doesn't count toward any total until someone reviews it. On the Hours page, a reviewer chooses Approve to make it final or Reject with a reason. Only Approved hours reach your reports. Entries still awaiting approval, and ones that were rejected, replaced, or voided, are left out.

Pull the report for your funder

Open the Reporting module and look under the Service Hours category. Volunteer hours summary gives you approved volunteer time for a period, Service hours by role breaks it out one row per role, 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, then export the result.

If you set a volunteer hourly value in settings, the summaries also show approved volunteer hours multiplied by that rate. It is the rate you entered, not an official or published one, so say where it came from if you put it on an in-kind match line.