What Is a Reservation Budget?
Based on your onboarding details and past performance, Trail's End automatically sets a storefront reservation budget for your unit. This budget determines how many total hours of storefront time your unit can reserve during the season.
The reservation budget is designed to give all units a fair opportunity to participate, preventing any single unit from claiming more storefront time than they realistically need, while still giving your unit room to grow as your sales increase.
Storefront Hour Budget is designed to protect against system abuse and should not constrain your unit in any way if you are using storefronts responsibly
How Your Budget Is Calculated
Your starting budget is based on your goals and past performance and is set by an internal system algorithm to be significantly higher than your projected need.
Additionally, your budget will automatically grow throughout the season as your unit sells via the app. You don't need to do anything, the system updates your budget as you sell.
Note: Your budget will only go up, never down
Only Trail's End created storefronts will count against your budget, your own custom created storefront hours will not.
How the Reservation Budget Works
You cannot reserve a storefront that would push your total reserved hours over your budget.
How to increase your budget
Use the hours you have - as you sell, your budget should increase faster than you sell so you never feel constraint
Release the Trail's End booked storefront hours you will not use - any hour that is released back into the system will not count against your budget and free up more for you to use
If you feel like you have an extreme case and think your budget will not be sufficient to support your goals and growth, reach out to our support team. We will review exceptions on a case by case basis. Again, our intent here is not to limit your success in any way.
Why is there a Reservation Budget?
In past seasons, some units unnecessarily claimed excessive amounts of storefront time, leaving fewer options for others. This extreme (even if accidental) behavior puts significant pressure on the total storefront supply and results in waste of valuable hours. The reservation budget system was built to address this, so that every unit has a meaningful opportunity to participate in storefront sales.
We know this may feel like a limitation, however, in our analysis this would only impact fewer than a dozen units and only those that claimed but did not use many hours. We do not expect any unit using the system in a normal way to be impacted. The intent isn't to hold you back; it's to make the system efficient and as effective as possible at helping fund kids' activities.
When will I see my budget?
Each unit has an onboarding deadline that is council specific. You can find this date in your Program Overview in the Leader Portal. The Storefront Budget will show the day after your onboarding deadline.