A local restaurant donates dinner for your gala auction. A board member gives you a used golf cart for the grounds crew. A collector offers a painting. All three are “in-kind gifts,” but they don’t belong in Altru the same way, and treating them identically is how development, finance, and curatorial end up with three different answers to “what did we receive this year?”
This guide covers how to think about non-cash gifts before you enter anything, what Altru generally handles well, where it’s thin, and how to keep art donations from creating problems for your auditors or your donors.
Sort the gift before you touch Altru
Most in-kind confusion comes from entering first and deciding later. Put every non-cash gift into one of these buckets:
- Goods you will use or sell: auction items, food and supplies for an event, equipment, gift shop inventory. These usually get recorded as revenue at a fair value your finance team agrees with.
- Services: pro bono legal work, design, printing labor, advertising space. Your finance team may need to track some of these for financial statements, but donors generally can’t deduct the value of their time. Your acknowledgment shouldn’t imply they can.
- Collection objects: art, artifacts, specimens, archival material you intend to accession. These follow different accounting and tax rules, covered below.
Agree on these buckets with your finance office in writing. It takes one meeting, and it prevents most of the cleanup that follows.
Entering a gift-in-kind as revenue
Altru records gifts as revenue on the donor’s constituent record, and non-cash payment types such as gift-in-kind are part of the standard donation workflow. The exact fields available on the in-kind details vary by version and configuration, so open a test entry in your sandbox before you write a procedure. Whatever the screen offers, capture the same core facts every time:
- The donor. Search for an existing constituent first. Businesses giving auction items are some of the most frequently duplicated records in any database, because each one gets entered under a slightly different name.
- The date you received the item, not the date of the pledge letter or the event.
- A clear description. “Weekend stay, two nights, lakeside cabin” is useful. “Auction item” is not.
- The value, and who set it. Use the donor’s stated value or a reasonable market value as your finance policy dictates. Note the source, for example “donor-provided retail price.”
- Designation and campaign or appeal, so gala items roll up with the gala and operating donations don’t get mixed into it.
Then post it through your normal batch and revenue process so finance sees it with everything else. If your organization posts to the general ledger from Altru, check that the in-kind payment type maps to the right account. Ask whoever set up your GL mapping, or Blackbaud support, rather than assuming it does.
Where in-kind records tend to fall short
Admins commonly run into limits with in-kind gifts in Altru: fewer descriptive fields than they’d like, no obvious place for appraisal details or condition notes, and reports that don’t separate in-kind totals from cash cleanly. Before you build workarounds, check what your version actually supports. Then fill the gaps with tools Altru already has:
- Attributes on the revenue record for things like valuation source, appraisal received (yes/no), or intended use (use, auction, collection).
- Notes or attached documents for the donor’s paperwork, photos, or a signed deed of gift reference.
- A saved revenue query filtered to the in-kind payment method, with your attributes as output columns. That one query becomes your year-end in-kind report and your audit worksheet.
Art and collection donations are different
This is where art museums, historic sites, and natural history collections need extra care. A painting that’s accessioned into the permanent collection is usually not treated the same way as a donated laptop.
Many museums follow accounting guidance that lets them choose not to capitalize collections, provided the objects are held for public exhibition or research, protected and cared for, and any sale proceeds are used for new acquisitions or direct care. Under that policy, a donated artwork often isn’t recognized as contribution revenue at all. Your auditor and your collections policy decide this, not your CRM. Confirm which approach your organization uses before entering a single object.
On the tax side, the museum does not appraise the gift for the donor. The donor is responsible for getting a qualified appraisal when one is required. Your role is a written acknowledgment that describes the object and states whether the donor received anything in return. Leave the dollar value off. Higher-value non-cash gifts may also involve IRS forms the museum has to sign or file, especially if you later sell the object within a few years. Your finance office or tax advisor should own that checklist.
A workable split for collection gifts
- Collections management system holds the object record: accession number, deed of gift, provenance, condition, location. Altru is not built to be a collections database, and you shouldn’t try to make it one.
- Altru holds the relationship: the donor’s constituent record, a note or interaction such as “Donated [object], accession [number], deed signed [date],” recognition preferences, and the acknowledgment you sent.
- If finance does record the gift as revenue (for example, an object accepted for resale rather than the collection), enter it as an in-kind gift using the value finance provides, and reference the accession or receipt number in the description.
Keeping the accession number in both systems is the bridge. When a curator asks who gave an object, or development asks what a donor has given over 20 years, both sides can answer.
Acknowledgments and recognition
Set up a separate acknowledgment letter for in-kind gifts so cash donation language (“your gift of $X”) never ends up on a letter for a sculpture or a box of supplies. Describe the item, thank the donor, and include the standard statement about goods or services received. If you list donors in an annual report, decide in advance whether in-kind and collection gifts count toward giving levels, and at what value. Uneven answers here cause awkward conversations with major donors.
Quick answers
Should we put the donor’s appraised value on the receipt?
Generally no. Describe the gift and let the donor’s appraisal stand on its own. Check with your tax advisor if you’re unsure about a specific gift.
Can we record volunteer hours as in-kind gifts?
You can track them, but keep them out of donor giving totals and off tax acknowledgments. Many organizations use a separate attribute or interaction type for this.
We already entered artwork as revenue. Now what?
Pull a query of those records, review them with finance, and adjust or reverse only after you agree on the policy. Document the change on each record so next year’s auditor can follow it.
