Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly

We've gone through several iterations of the cookie booth tracking form. This is the most recent!

Okay, you guys. This is why you studied algebra. You studied algebra when you were 13 because one day you'd be a Girl Scout troop leader, and your Girl Scouts would go mad for cookie sales, and you'd have to schedule nine kids into 40+ hours of booths every week, and then you'd have to figure out how to divide the booth sales fairly between everyone who worked, for all the various hours they worked, and you'd also have to make sure that your booth sales matched your booth inventory every time, and that your physical inventory matched what your database says you have.

And don't forget that you'd have to figure out how many of each type of cookie to even bring to every booth in the first place!

Functional literacy in math. That's what algebra gives you.

The most important thing is that whatever method you use, you MUST WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN. An accurate paper trail is key. Count your inventory. If it's off, note it. Count your money. If it's off, note it. Know exactly how many boxes of each variety of cookie you're taking to each booth. Know exactly how much starting cash you're taking. Know exactly what kids and what adults worked there, and exactly how long they worked. Know what you took in via credit cards. Know what you took in via cash.

The key to doing all that easily and efficiently is using a booth form. Some councils make their own, and you can find them if you Google, but if you know exactly what information you want on your form, and especially if your partner is a graphic designer (yay!), then you can make your own. 

At the top of my form I fill in the booth location, time, and date. My Girl Scout troop works so many booths that we might be back and forth between the same location twice in one day, or three times in a weekend.

Below that is space to write in all the kids and adults who worked, and the hours that they worked. We sometimes have booths that are six to eight hours long in a single spot, and have to be able to record kids coming and going all day for various hours, or even taking a break and coming back later. You also need to know all the adults who were present, if for no other reason than you know who to loop into the mass text if the numbers come out wrong.

Next come a series of boxes that are specific to what our troop needs. The first box is to record the amount of money in the Operation: Cookie Drop/Cookies for a Cause donation can. The second box holds tally marks that must be made every time someone runs a cookie donation on credit card, because our credit card processing company doesn't let you look at transaction details easily--if someone thinks that they might have forgotten a cookie donation credit card transaction, or if the final amount is off, I have to manually click through every single transaction to see its details, and it. Is. TEDIOUS.

The third box records the amount in our own troop donation can, although this is not incorporated into any other calculations. Early in the season, the kids were trying to collect enough donations to buy a box of Girl Scout cookies for every kid in our local Backpack Buddies program, and so we'd often use the box to record that, instead. If we do local donations again next year, I will likely include yet another box just for that.

The next couple of boxes are so that adults whose phones were used to run the credit card processing app can record their transaction totals. Adults come and go, too, so you need more than one box for this.

The final two boxes record the amount of starting cash and ending cash. Our cookies are all $5, so we start with $200.

2023 Update: Our cookies are now all $6 a box, so we go back and forth between starting with $200 or $300 while we try to decide which is better. Whatever number we use, we record it!

I devote a lot of space simply to the cookie inventory. Using a lot of space to keep the numbers separate helps avoid confusion, and the color coding and illustrations are visual reminders to help keep everything correctly sorted by type. The bigger spacing lets the kids, who often can't write tiny, also do inventory, and it leaves some room for calculations.

Notice that unlike a lot of booth tally sheets, mine doesn't include a place to record parents who take cookies from the booth supply to add to their kid's personal orders. I HIGHLY discourage doing this at cookie booths, because it's not the time and place and it's distracting, but in case of emergency I'll do it and just subtract what they take from the starting inventory of that booth. Another reason for all that space between the inventory number boxes!

Below the inventory section is where you walk through the two main booth calculations: the calculation of inventory, and the calculation of money. The first line is inventory, so you copy down what you sold of each type of cookie, then what you sold of Operation: Cookie Drop/Cookies for a Cause (include what you sold from both the donation can and by credit card). Add those together, multiply by the cost per box of cookies, and you'll see how much profit you earned.

The second calculation is just of the money. Copy down your ending cash, then your starting cash, and subtract them. Add to that your total credit card sales and the amount in the Operation: Cookie Drop/Cookies for a Cause can (do NOT include the amount on credit card here, because that's already included in your credit card sales). Does your final answer equal your final answer from your cookie inventory?

If yes, YAY!!!!!

If no...

1. Recount your cookies. And I mean REALLY recount them! Are you trying to count them in your car? Unload them all and spread out so you can see what you've actually got. Repack everything so that you have only one partially full case of each type and the rest are all full cases--multiple partial cases of the same type of cookie are inefficient to carry and a nightmare to count.
2. Recount your cash. Get someone else to count it this time, or ideally two someones.
3. Double-check your credit card transactions. Log out and then back into your processing app to make sure its transaction record is completely current. Make sure no other adults ran credit cards on their phone and just forgot to record it. If you use Digital Cookie, double-check that no adults accidentally ran cards through their kid's site instead of the troop's site. Look through each transaction and make sure you didn't charge someone twice. If a credit card transaction seems weirdly large, see if anyone remembers a customer buying a ton of cookies at once--if nobody remembers it, someone probably punched something in wrong during the transaction.
4. Recalculate all of your math. Do the inventory subtractions again, with a calculator if necessary. If you're counting by cases, again, use a calculator to make sure you've got the total number of boxes correct. 
5. If you can, compare your current total troop inventory to the total troop inventory that you should have. I can rarely do this, because I've got multiple booths going at one time, but if you've just done one booth, then a whole troop inventory might find that you mysteriously are missing a box or have an extra box that will match what you're over or under.

Here's what these booth forms look like in real life:

You can see we write all over them and alter them however we need to. Next year's updated form might include a Notes area, because there are often extra details we want to record...

...such as how on earth we can end up with $817, when all of our cookie boxes are FIVE DOLLARS EACH. I SUPER love it when everything equals out, and I have to admit that when we're over or under, even by a little bit, it drives me nuts.

ESPECIALLY when we're over by a number that doesn't even equal a box of cookies!

Thankfully, we mostly equal out:

But sometimes we don't, sigh:

But mostly we do:

So how do you assign all of these sold cookie boxes fairly to kids who worked varying hours at each booth?

You turn it into a rate-time-distance problem!

Distance = rate x time. Distance will represent how many cookie boxes a kid sold. Rate is how many boxes the booth sold per hour, and time is how many hours the kid worked.

To find the rate for a booth, add up the total number of hours every kid worked altogether. Let's say Kid A worked 2 hours, Kid B worked 3 hours, and Kid C worked 5 hours at a booth. Maybe they worked all together for part of the time, or maybe they all came in shifts--doesn't matter. Just add up the totals and you have 10.

Divide the total number of cookies sold at that booth by the total number of hours worked. Let's say that this booth sold 100 boxes of cookies. 100/10 = 10, so 10 boxes of cookies per hour worked is the rate for this booth.

Rate x time means that to find each kid's distance, or total boxes of cookies that kid, personally, gets credit for, all you have to do is multiply the number of hours they worked by the rate.

Kid A earned 2x10, or 20 boxes of cookies.
Kid B earned 3x10, or 30 boxes of cookies.
Kid C earned 5x10, or 50 boxes of cookies.

This also works with partial hours. If Kid A had worked 2.75 hours, then they'd have earned 2.75 x 10, or 27.5 boxes of cookies. You can't allocate partial boxes, so someone will have to gain a whole box or lose a whole box somewhere.

If you're mathy, like me, then you can eat up all your free time doing all this pleasant cookie booth math. But even if you're not mathy, you should be functionally literate in math, which means that you should be able to easily handle the calculations required. And, of course, it's very important to give ownership of this process over to the kids, whenever you're able. An elementary school student can do all of the inventory calculations with your oversight. A middle school student can run all of this math with your guidance. A high school student who's had enough Algebra 1 to know how to solve a rate-time-distance problem can do it all without you standing over their shoulder.

And what's more, they SHOULD be doing this. THIS is why we study math. We study it so that we have the tools to solve whatever problems come our way in life. We study it because it's important to be functionally literate in all areas. We study it because we want to be able to calculate, distribute, count, and audit.

We study it because one day we might find ourselves in the Girl Scouts, and Girl Scouts sell cookies!

P.S. Want to read more about Girl Scout cookie booth math and marketing? Here's my complete series (so far!):

• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!
• My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales
• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly
• Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Signage and Campaigns

P.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!

Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!

If you've got a troop of motivated kids, then Girl Scout cookie season is BIG BUSINESS. Kids use the money their troop earns during the cookie season for everything they can dream up and plan. Cookie sales have paid for my troop to travel to both Cincinnati and St. Louis, to spend the night at an aquarium and a zoo, to conduct service projects for kids in need in Honduras and in our town, and to supply all the materials and fees for dozens of badge-earning activities and fun bonding activities and adventures both big and small.

In some ways, the math is simple: the more the kids earn, the more they can do with that money. In every other way, however, the math is quite sophisticated: your troop has to order cookies from the council, in most cases before you've sold them, and those cookies can't be returned. Don't sell them all, and instead of the kids earning profits, you'll be in debt to the council. You can sell more cookies at cookie booths in public locations than you can as individuals going door-to-door, but then you need to figure out how many cookies to order from council to take to a booth. Too few, and you've wasted opportunities for more profit. Too many, and you're back to worrying how to sell them all. Take cash to make change and then hope that all the kids (and adults!) count correctly. Take a credit card reader and hope that everyone successfully processes the customers' cards without errors. Count the inventory before and after the booth and do the same with the money, and hope that they both match. Take it all home, count the inventory again, and hope that it matches what your database says you should have. If it doesn't, dig into your non-existent forensic accounting skills to figure out what's wrong and hopefully fix it. Allocate cookies to every kid who worked at the booth, in proportions equal to the hours that they worked. Calculate the percentages of every type of cookie you sold, compare that to your expectations, and then use that to make your next order from council.

Do that over and over and over again. Bonus points if you, as we do, have a troop that runs several booths simultaneously in different places, and even more bonus points on the busy weekends when people are doing inventory and money counting on the fly so that they can pass stuff to another booth starting the next hour across town. And, of course, I'm not even mentioning all the skills that you're also busy mentoring in the kids all this time, and how you're teaching them to do all these things, as well, because that's a given. Add in the extra hours it takes to make sure they understand and take ownership of the process.

Four years ago this was all new to us, and fortunately our goals were set reasonably low, as well (although it didn't feel like that at the time!). Now, of course, we're such old hands that many of the kids beat that first-year goal during pre-orders, and the rest have usually beaten it by the end of the day that cookies finally come in. And yet the kids keep challenging themselves. This year, four of our nine kids (including my own older kid!) have decided to try for 1,000 sales, and one kid who's sold 1,000 for the past two years is this year trying for 1,500. Don't forget that when the kids have big goals you also have to make sure you've got enough booths to make that happen, and please know that angling for booth picks is bloodthirsty business, and you've got to make sure that your orders from council are enough to stock all these booths AND ensure that the kids can meet their goals. You want a little extra, because rarely will a kid be able to meet their goal and then stop selling that second, mid-booth, but again, you don't want too many extra because selling extra troop cookies after you've all met your goals is just about the most miserable work there is.

It's a lot to do, and a lot of it IS luck and guesswork. You can virtually elbow all the other troop leaders out of your way to get the hottest booth pick, only for a winter storm to trash all your sales that day, while all the booths in lousy spots the day before get the awesome pre-winter storm sales. Or maybe last year everybody and their dog was screaming for Do-Si-Dos, so you order them at that percent this year and it takes you a whole season to get through what you'd thought would be one weekend's supply--that happened to me last year with Trefoils, and it was SUPER stressful.

The Great Trefoil Overage of 2018 aside, though, what I've learned is that while much of it is luck and guesswork, a lot more of it is logical and predictable than you might think. If I lay everything out in graphs and charts and numbers, then I can predict quite accurately what percentages of each type of cookie to order, and how many cookies to bring to booths, and which booth spots are the best on which particular dates and times. Just choosing a booth spot that typically sells 10 more boxes of cookies an hour over another equally likely booth spot is a big deal, especially if you can do that consistently over the course of the season.

So here are some of the analytics that I use for my troop's Girl Scout cookie sales. The most important is the one that helps me figure out percentages for ordering cookies from council. The first year the girls sold cookies, I was lost. I tried asking my Service Unit Manager at the time, and she just sort of told me something along the lines of, "Oh, a few cases of Thin Mints and Samoas, a couple of cases of everything else, etc."

I was all, "Seriously? No, seriously. How MANY?!?" It was... unhelpful.

Fortunately, after you have a whole season behind you, especially if you've done several booths, the math is a lot easier. All you have to do is take your booth record sheets from the last year (which you DO have and you DID keep, yes?!?) and calculate the percentages for each type of cookie that you sold at each booth. If you're collecting donations for physical boxes of cookies that you donate locally, don't include those, as you know you mostly take them from what isn't selling as well as it should (and if you're not doing it that way, you SHOULD be!). Also don't include what kids sell individually, because they always sell what they've ordered, even if that means going door-to-door selling nothing but Tagalongs after they've sold out of everything else. Booths should be fully stocked for most of the season, so booth sales should be reflecting what customers actually want, in the percentages that they want them.

Calculate these percentages for several, if not all, of your booths, then average the percentages for each type to calculate the overall percentage of sale for each type of cookie the previous year:

Above is the master document that I make and then pull all of my information from for the rest of my analytics. Notice I've got date, time, day of the week, booth location, number of hours, total sale numbers, percentage of sale for each type of cookie at each booth, and color codes to indicate multiple booths at the same location. It's pretty messy, so you might not be able to see where all that information is, but I assure you, it's there!

That document is all scut work, looking back at the messy handwriting on all of last year's booth tally forms, trying to decipher some fuzzy calculations that were done on the fly, etc., so I don't ask the kids to help with that part. But kids can certainly take my numbers and average the overall percentage for each type of cookie; could even make a pie chart from it, although I find that kind of chart less useful for our purposes. It's good math for a kid, though.

Those averaged percentages for each type of cookie are what I order from the cupboard. I have another chart where I have my possible orders listed by the hundreds and have each type of cookie calculated in both the actual numbers and the numbers averaged to the nearest case, both up and down, so that I don't have to do all the calculating fresh every week. 

So that tells me what percentages to order, but I still need to know how many overall boxes to order. That's a whole other set of graphs!

For that, I took each booth location that we worked last year and broke it down into sales per hour. If we did several booths at that location, I put the graphs all on the same page:

 Notice that this information is less useful when we've gotten a booth spot for a really long period of time. For instance, in the bar graphs above, you can see that when we did a Sunday morning booth there, our per-hour sales were fewer than 20 boxes. But if you just looked at the Sunday where we started there at 10 but stayed all day, our average is over 40 boxes per hour. Some hours in there must have been REALLY good to bring the average up enough to mask the lousy morning sales, but I don't have the information to see where they were.

 If we only did one booth at that location, I put it by itself:

It's a decent start to figuring out sales numbers, but with just one booth spot, you can't rely on it completely.

The per-hour number, then, is a good way to figure out how much to order for a weekend of booth sales. But what you don't see very clearly in the bar graphs is that you also have to take into account how far into the season your booths are. A booth spot the first weekend of cookie sales is obviously going to sell a lot more cookies than that same spot six weeks later. Here's the graph that I made to represent how our sales fell off over time last year:

I think that this graph actually makes it easier to see how the day of the week affects sales, too. And it's certainly a good visual for the kids that extra hustling is likely to pay off better early in the season than later. 

It's a good idea to continue calculating these percentages and sales per hour as you go through the current cookie season, both because the percentages do change a little every year, and I've made some small adjustments to how I'm ordering, and because you're adding new booth dates and times to the information that you have available. This is the best time to teach the kids how to make these calculations and use this information, as well. This is Step 5 of the Junior Cookie CEO badge, but since the whole purpose of earning a badge is to use the skills you learn, older kids could be expected as a matter of course to make these calculations and predictions part of their cookie sale experience every year. 

Today, for instance, it's my older kid's turn to help me. While I'm writing this, she's going through last weekend's booth tallies and calculating the percentages of each type of cookie sold. Next, she'll average that with last year's average to come up with a corrected current average. Finally, she'll multiply by ten to come up with the number of each type that I want to order from council this week, divide by 12 to find the number of cases I'll order, and round down to the nearest whole number so that I don't have to deal with any partial cases. 

Sounds like a pretty good homeschool afternoon, yes? 

P.S. Want to read more about Girl Scout cookie booth math and marketing? Here's my complete series (so far!):

• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Analytics, or, Math Helps Girl Scouts Sell More Cookies!
• My Very Own Girl Scout Cookie Booth Calculator: How Many Cookies to Order for Booth Sales
• Girl Scout Cookie Booth Math: Equal It Out and Assign It Fairly
• Girl Scout Cookie Marketing: Kid-Led and Kid-Made Signage and Campaigns

P.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!