My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales

Happy First Week of Girl Scout Cookie Booths!

My Service Unit's Girl Scout cookies are being delivered by semi-trucks this week, and this weekend is my troop's inaugural cookie booth of the season. This is my younger kid's last year in Girl Scouts, and therefore my final year of cookie captaincy. And so, like a Girl Scout Ambassador earning the My Cookie Resume badge, it's time to share what I've learned!

If you're a returning troop, I've written before about my VERY involved process of calculating super accurate predictions of how many cookies to order for booth sales. That process was crucial during the years that my Girl Scout troop was routinely selling 10,000+ boxes of cookies per season, because even a small error in percentage REALLY adds up when you multiply it by 10,000. One year, I miscalculated how many Trefoils we'd need for our Initial Order so badly that it took us almost the entire season to sell just that Initial Order--yikes! 

The last couple of years, however, as the kids have grown up and everyone's high school graduation is now in sight, they've become more focused on spending all those cookie profits on cool adventures, and less on earning even more piles of gold to swim around in like Scrooge McDuck, so cookie sales have chilled out A LOT. That means, as well, that I can chill out on the math quite a bit. So here's my MUCH more casual method of calculation that works just fine for troops whose total sales goal is less than 2,000 boxes. 

And an even bigger cheat sheet: I'll also tell you exactly what percentages we're ordering for booths here in our Central Indiana council, so you can do the same if you think your customers will have the same preferences as our Hoosiers. NOBODY should have to suffer through a season of trying to upsell customers on Trefoils!

The situation that makes this calculation method work particularly well for my troop is that, as a well-established Girl Scout troop, we have a well-established non-Hot Spot location. We've spent years crafting a warm relationship with this business, and during cookie season it's our primary selling spot. So unlike in that booth analytics post where I showed you all my bar graphs comparing different locations at different times over the course of the cookie season, this year I mostly only have to calculate for a single location.

I've also got fewer kids who want to sell at booths this year, so unlike our heyday years when I might have had three booths going simultaneously and some kind of booth running for something like 15 hours over the course of the weekend, this year it will probably just be one or two booths, for probably a max of 4-5 hours, over the course of an entire weekend. It's no longer a struggle to simply have enough cookies in the troop stock to send to booths, so I can afford to be a LOT more chill about precise ordering. 

I miss the excitement... but I don't miss the stress!

ANYWAY...

For a returning troop to make a reasonably precise prediction about cookie percentages for a booth at a single location, find three booth sheets from that location last year. You want booth sheets from super early in the cookie season (and you should be really encouraging the kids to sell hard super early, because that's when your sales will be highest!), and from booths in which you had a full inventory and didn't sell out of anything. You're not going to know how many Toffee Tastics you could have sold if your booth didn't have them in the first place!

For example, I originally pulled this booth sheet, but when I sat down with it I immediately realized that it wouldn't work:

We ran out of Adventurefuls at that booth, dang it! I can't calculate how many we sold if we didn't have them for the entire time!

This one works!

And you can see that I already did my percentage calculations for it--I should hope I did, because Initial Orders were due last week!

To calculate percentages of each cookie, you need to know 1) the total number of physical boxes sold (don't count donations!) and 2) the total number of each type of cookie sold.

The calculation is this:

Type of Cookie = x% of Total Sold

You plug in the numbers for the type of cookie and the total sold, then solve for x.

For instance, Lemon Ups:

9 = x% of 262

9/262 =x%

After you get the answer for 9/262=.034, multiply it by 100/move the decimal two places to the right to get the percent

3.4 =x%

Complete that calculation for each type of cookie, and you'll know what percentages of each you sold at that booth.

Do the same calculations for two more booth sheets, then average them to find the average percent of each type of cookie sold.

Here are the percentages I ordered:

• ADVENTUREFULS: 6%
• LEMONUPS: 4% 
• TREFOILS: 4%
• DOSIDOS: 8%
• SAMOAS: 21%
• TAGALONGS: 11% (I might have under-ordered these, so I'll throw in an extra case when I stock the booth)
• THIN MINTS: 43% (I might have over-ordered these, but you can ALWAYS sell Thin Mints)
• S'MORES: 2%
• TOFFEE TASTICS: 2% (be very conservative about these, because they're SO hard to sell if you overstock them. If you happen to sell out at a booth, just have your troop's Digital Cookie QR code on hand so customers can order for Girl Delivery)

So you know at what percentage you should order; now, you have to figure out how many total boxes to order!

For this, you're not going to average. Instead, if you're a returning troop, find your top-selling booth and calculate that one, then add a little more for optimism and to make completely sure that you won't run out. Our top-selling booth last year sold 262 boxes of physical cookies (don't count donations!) over 5 hours. Divide 262 by 5, and they sold 52.4 boxes per hour. I'll round that up to 60 per hour.

To decide how many boxes of each type of cookie to bring to that booth this year, then, I just have to know how many hours it will run. If it runs for, say, 2 hours, then I should bring 120 boxes of cookies at the minimum, and early in the season I'll pad that even more if I've got the troop stock to do it. I'll definitely throw in another case of Tagalongs so that I don't have to run an emergency case over mid-booth!

And if I have the troop stock, I will ALWAYS round up to the nearest case. I never send partial cases if I can get away with it, because they're just that more unwieldy to carry and count. 

To do the math, break each percentage back down to its decimal, then multiply by 120.

Here are the cookies I would bring to this two-hour booth:

• ADVENTUREFULS: .06 x 120 = 7.2 boxes = 1 CASE
• LEMONUPS: .04 is smaller than .06 so I'm not even going to calculate; I'll just bring 1 CASE
• TREFOILS: 1 CASE
• DOSIDOS: .08 x 120 = 9.6 boxes = 1 CASE, but sometimes DoSiDos randomly sell like wildfire, so if I have it I might even bring 3
• SAMOAS: .21 x 120 = 25.2 boxes = 3 CASES
• TAGALONGS: .11 x 120 =13.2, but I'm worried I underordered so I'm going to throw even another case in there and bring 3 CASES
• THIN MINTS: .43 x 120 = 51.6 = 5 CASES
• S'MORES: 1 CASE
• TOFFEE TASTICS: 1 CASE

If you're a first-year troop, it's SO hard to give you an estimate of how many cookies to bring to your booth. Per-hour rates are very location-specific, and honestly, they're very troop-specific, too! One of my troop's greatest sources of pride is how HARD they work at cookie booths. The kids are all highly experienced, they're very active sellers with multiple tactics, they work specifically to up-sell and solicit cookie donations, and their per-hour sales rate is, therefore, higher than kids who don't put themselves out there that much or are less well-practiced in salesmanship. 

If you're a first-year troop, there are a couple of strategies you can use to help you predict how many boxes of cookies to order for booth sales. One is to use your troop's selling goal, calculated by adding up each kid's individual selling goal, as a target. Order maybe 50% of that at your Initial Order, and for the first couple of booths, bring as much troop stock as you can carry and keep track of. Your goal will be to not run out of cookies so you can get good per-hour sales estimates for future booths. 

If your Service Unit has an active Facebook group or well-attended Service Unit meetings, you can also consult other troop leaders to see what they bring. Just keep in mind that your mileage will vary quite a bit regarding answers! There will be a troop leader who will confidently tell you something like "oh, a couple of cases of this and a couple of cases of that, etc." because they simply don't keep track, or another troop leader who will give you an extremely low number because their kids spend every booth staring at their phones instead of selling, or another troop leader who tells you a GIANT number because their kids are cookie-selling machines.

I've never tried this particular tactic, but I'd also maybe recommend calling your council's cookie staff and asking them if they, by any chance, keep track of booth averages or per-hour sales for your Service Unit booths or even specific Hot Spot booths. They should, because they certainly have all those numbers available to them, but who knows if they're actually doing anything with those numbers, sigh. If it was me on staff you wouldn't even believe how many pie charts and line graphs I'd be shoving in your face!

Y'all, I really can't believe this is my last year selling Girl Scout cookies. What do people even DO with their February when they don't have a house full of cookie boxes?!?

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!