The year-end count is done, the clipboards are back from the gift shop, and the numbers don’t match what Altru says is on the shelf. Twelve mugs short, three extra tote bags, a case of plush toys that was damaged in the stockroom and never written off. Now someone has to get Altru to agree with reality.
Adjusting merchandise inventory in Altru isn’t hard for one item. Doing it cleanly for two hundred items, and being able to explain every change to your finance office afterward, takes more planning. This guide covers both, plus the gaps you should know about before you start.
What an inventory adjustment actually is
An adjustment changes the on-hand quantity of a merchandise item without a sale or a purchase order receipt. It’s how you account for:
- Shrinkage (theft, loss, miscounts)
- Damage (broken, expired, or unsellable stock)
- Count corrections after a physical inventory
- Internal use (items pulled for staff gifts, donor thank-yous, or events)
- Found stock that was never received properly
Keep these separate from returns and receiving. A customer return should go back through a sale reversal, and new stock should come in through receiving, so your sales and cost history stay accurate. Adjustments are for everything else.
Adjusting a single item
For one-off corrections, you’ll work from the merchandise item itself in Altru’s merchandise area. Find the item, open its inventory details, and record the adjustment: the quantity change (up or down), the date, and a reason or comment. Exact labels and screen layout vary by Altru release and by how your organization’s merchandise setup was configured, so if you can’t find the adjustment option on the item, check your security role first. Inventory changes are often restricted to merchandise managers.
Two habits make single adjustments much easier to live with later:
- Always fill in the reason. “Damaged in storage” or “Annual count 6/30” is enough. A blank reason is the thing auditors and your future self will ask about.
- Use the real date. If the loss happened last month and your finance team closes monthly, talk to them before backdating anything.
When you have dozens or hundreds of changes
This is where most shops get stuck. Revenue, constituent updates, and several other areas of Altru have batch entry, so it’s natural to expect a merchandise adjustment batch too. As far as we know, Altru doesn’t offer a dedicated batch type for bulk merchandise adjustments the way it does for revenue. That may differ in your version, so confirm by checking the batch types available to you in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support directly before you plan around it.
Without a batch, here’s a workable approach for a big count:
- Freeze sales for the count. Count after close or before open, so nothing sells between the count and the adjustment.
- Export current on-hand quantities. Pull a list of items with SKU, name, and Altru’s on-hand quantity into a spreadsheet. Use a query if your merchandise data is available as a query source, or an existing inventory report otherwise.
- Add the counted quantity next to each line and calculate the difference. Sort by the size of the variance.
- Investigate the big ones first. A variance of forty units is usually a receiving mistake or a duplicate item record, not theft. Fix the cause before adjusting.
- Enter adjustments item by item, using one consistent reason (for example, “FY26 physical count”). Split the work between two people with clearly divided SKU ranges so nobody adjusts the same item twice.
- Re-export and compare. Every line in your spreadsheet should now show zero variance. Save that file; it’s your audit trail.
It’s tedious, but the spreadsheet does double duty: it’s your working list and your proof of what changed.
Reporting on adjustments
The second common frustration is getting a clean report of what was adjusted, when, by whom, and why. Altru’s standard merchandise reports focus on sales and stock levels. Whether you can get an adjustment-level history out of a built-in report or a query depends on your version and which fields are exposed, so test before you promise finance a report.
Things to try, in order:
- Look at the item’s inventory history for a single SKU. This is usually the quickest way to see individual adjustments.
- Check the query sources available to you for merchandise or inventory transactions. If adjustment records, dates, and reasons are exposed, build a saved query filtered by date range and adjustment type.
- Compare inventory value snapshots. If neither works, export on-hand quantity and cost at the start and end of the period. The change, minus sales and receipts, gives you the net adjustment in dollars, which is often what finance needs anyway.
- Keep your own log. The count spreadsheet from the section above, saved per period, fills the gap when the system can’t produce the history on its own.
Talk to finance before you start
Inventory adjustments usually affect the general ledger as a shrinkage or cost-of-goods expense. How those post depends on your merchandise and GL configuration in Altru. Before a large year-end adjustment, agree with your finance office on:
- Which reasons map to which expense accounts (damage and theft are sometimes tracked separately)
- The date the adjustments should carry
- Whether they want the adjustments entered before or after a particular close
A ten-minute conversation here avoids a reconciliation headache that can take weeks to untangle.
Quick answers
Can I import adjustments from a spreadsheet?
Not that we’re aware of through a standard merchandise adjustment import. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your version before assuming either way.
Should I adjust negative on-hand quantities to zero?
Find out why they’re negative first. Negative stock usually means sales were recorded against items that were never received, so the real fix is receiving, not an adjustment.
How often should we count?
At least once a year for everything, and more often for small, high-value, or frequently stolen items. Smaller rolling counts make each adjustment session much lighter.
