Volunteer Hours & Rota Log

What this tool does

CM8-177 is a volunteer hours log and a light rota in one file. You record who volunteered, when, on what, and for how long. It totals the hours, values them at a rate you choose, tracks the travel and expenses you paid back, works out a no-show rate, and tells you which volunteers have an induction, a background check or a piece of training outstanding.

It exists because funders ask for volunteer hours and almost nobody has counted them. Hours reconstructed from memory at the end of a grant year are always wrong, usually low, and impossible to defend if anyone asks how you arrived at them. Thirty seconds after each shift is the only reliable way.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so volunteer names, addresses of visits and check details never leave the computer you are using.

What to log, and how often

One row per volunteer per session. If four people work the same shift, that is four rows — anything else makes the per-volunteer figures impossible. Log the session on the day, or at the latest at the end of the week.

• Activity or project — the thing the hours belong to. This is the breakdown funders ask for, so keep the names consistent. "Lunch club" and "Lunch Club" are two activities to this tool.
• Session or shift — which slot it was: "Wednesday lunch", "Saturday morning", "Setup crew".
• Role — what the person does. The volunteer summary shows the role from each person's most recent row, so if somebody changes role the summary follows them.
• Note — what was done, who supervised, why a session was cancelled, what a reimbursement covered. The note is the thing that saves you when a figure is questioned a year later.

Hours, times and breaks

You can record the hours in either of two ways, and the tool prefers whichever you give it:

Leave the hours box empty and the tool reads the start and end times. Times may be written as 09:00, 9.00, 9 AM or 13:30 — all four parse. An end time earlier than the start is treated as an overnight shift, so 22:00 to 02:00 is four hours, not minus twenty.

Breaks are the reason the hours box exists. The clock span of a shift is not the same as the hours volunteered. For an 08:00 to 16:00 shift with an hour for lunch, leave both times in so the rota is right and enter 7 in the hours box. The tool will not accept hours longer than the span between the times, because that is always a mistake.

Round honestly and consistently. Quarter hours are enough precision for anything a funder will read, and the field steps in quarters for that reason.

What counts and what does not

Only sessions with the status attended contribute hours. This is not a detail — it is the single most common way a volunteer hours figure gets inflated.

A scheduled session is a plan. A cancelled session did not happen. A no-show is a shift somebody was booked for and did not do. None of them are volunteering, and none of them may be reported as hours contributed. The register shows the session length for all four statuses so the rota still reads properly, but the counted column — and every total, tile, chart and table in the tool — uses attended sessions only.

The tool refuses to save hours against a scheduled, cancelled or missed session, so the mistake cannot be made by accident.

Notional value — read this before you report it

Used properly, the figure answers one question: roughly what scale of work is being done here for nothing? That is worth saying in an annual review or a grant application, because a hundred hours means little to a reader who has no feel for your operation.

Used improperly, it becomes "the charity received donated time worth this much" on an income line, or "we saved this much" in a budget, and neither is true. You did not receive money, and you did not spend less than you planned — you would not have bought those hours at that price, or at all.

Three rules keep you out of trouble:

• Always label it. "Notional value of volunteer time, not included in income" is enough. Never let the figure appear next to real money without that label.
• Always state the rate and where it came from. A defensible choice is the median hourly pay for comparable paid work in your area. Do not use a professional charge-out rate for stewarding a fete.
• Never add it to real money. Not to income, not to reserves, not to match funding, unless a funder has told you in writing exactly how they want volunteer time treated — some do, and their rules win over anything here.

If in doubt, report the hours and leave the money out. The hours are the fact; the value is an opinion about the hours.

Travel and expenses

Reimbursing a volunteer's out-of-pocket costs is real money leaving the organisation, and it is the one figure here that does belong in your accounts. The tool tracks it two ways:

Leave the travel amount blank and the tool values the distance at your rate. Enter an amount and it uses that instead. Entering 0 is not the same as leaving it blank — 0 means the volunteer declined the money, and stops the distance being valued. That distinction matters when somebody asks why the reimbursement total does not match the distances.

Distance is recorded in whichever unit you set on the Settings tab. The tool never converts between kilometres and miles, so pick one and use it for every row. A round trip means the whole journey, out and back.

Reimbursements are counted on attended, missed and cancelled sessions, because money can genuinely be owed for a journey somebody made before a session was called off. They are never counted on a scheduled session — a plan has not cost anything yet — and the tool will not let you save one.

How volunteer expenses are treated for tax, what evidence you must hold, and whether a flat allowance is permitted at all differ by country. Reimburse actual costs against receipts unless you have taken advice saying otherwise, and never pay anything that looks like a wage.

The no-show rate

Scheduled sessions are excluded because they have not happened yet, and cancelled sessions are excluded because the organisation, not the volunteer, ended them. The denominator is only the sessions that actually went ahead or should have.

The rate is only as honest as your logging. If you write down attendances and quietly skip the no-shows, the rate is zero and tells you nothing. A rate that climbs is usually a rota problem — shifts too long, too early, or booked too far ahead — rather than a people problem.

Induction, checks and training

Three ticks travel with each row: induction complete, background check complete, role training complete. A background check can also carry an expiry date, and the tool counts down to it.

Two things to understand about these ticks:

• They belong to the person, not the session, but they are recorded on rows. The volunteer summary and the compliance tile therefore use each volunteer's most recent dated row as their current position. Update the ticks as things are completed and the summary follows; leave old rows alone and the history stays accurate.
• The tool treats all three as required for everybody. That is deliberately conservative. If a role genuinely does not need a background check, the honest options are to record it as complete with a note explaining why it was not required, or to accept the flag and explain it in the report. Do not simply ignore a red line, and do not decide for yourself that a role involving unsupervised contact with people who may be at risk is exempt.

Set the check validity on the Settings tab and, when you tick a completed check without an expiry date, the preview line suggests one that many months on from the session date. It is a suggestion, not a rule: whether checks expire, and after how long, is set by your own policy or by whoever requires the check. Leave the expiry blank if your policy is that they do not expire — the summary will say "no check expiry recorded" rather than pretend to know.

A tick is not evidence. It records that somebody said a check was done. It does not prove it was done, does not say whether it was the right level of check for the role, and is no substitute for holding the actual result under whatever conditions apply where you are.

Using it as a rota

Log future sessions with the status scheduled and the tool becomes a simple forward rota: filter to scheduled, sort by date, and you have the coming shifts with the times, the people and — usefully — their compliance status. A volunteer booked onto a shift with an outstanding check shows red before the shift happens, which is the only moment the information is any use.

When the session has been done, edit the row, set the status to attended and add the hours. Nothing is double-counted, because the same row simply changes state.

Reporting to funders

Most volunteer reporting asks for four things, and all four are on the printed report: total hours, the number of distinct volunteers, a breakdown by activity, and something about reliability. Before you send it:

• Set the date filter to the funder's period, not to whatever is on screen. The scope line under the report title states the filter in force — check it says what you think it says.
• Check the activity names in the activity summary. Two spellings of the same project split the hours across two lines and make the report look careless.
• Decide whether to include the notional value at all. If you do, label it, state the rate, and keep it away from every real figure. If the funder has its own rate or its own rule, use theirs.
• Say what is not in the figures. Trustee time, informal help, hours nobody logged. Being explicit that the total is a floor, not a ceiling, is far better than being asked why it looks low.

The volunteer count on the tiles is distinct names with at least one attended session in the current filter. Two people entered as "J. Smith" and "Jane Smith" count as two; the same person entered both ways counts as two as well. Consistent naming is the whole of the answer.

Volunteer data

This file holds names, roles, movements and the fact that a background check exists. That is personal information about identifiable people, and in many places check-related information is treated as especially sensitive.

Keep only what you actually need. Volunteer numbers or initials work perfectly well in place of full names if the file will be shared internally. Do not record check reference numbers, certificate contents or anything about what a check disclosed — this file is the wrong place for it. Restrict who can open the machine it sits on, treat exports as confidential, and delete records when your retention policy says so.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, headline figures, the four charts, the volunteer and activity summaries, the full session log and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.

Everything obeys the filter, including the CSV. Clear the filters before issuing anything described as the full year, and check the scope line on the report says what you intend.

Saving your work

Sessions, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the log for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a session really happened, whether the hours are honest, whether a background check was actually carried out or whether it was the right check for the role. It does not report anything to anybody, and it confirms nothing about anybody.

What checks are required for which roles, who may hold the results, how long records may be kept, how volunteer expenses must be treated, and how volunteer time may be presented in accounts and grant claims all differ by country, by sector and by funder. This is an internal record-keeping and calculation aid — not legal, accounting or safeguarding advice, and not a substitute for your own policies or for advice from somebody qualified to give it.