A check arrives from United Way, or an electronic deposit lands from Benevity, YourCause, or a company’s own giving platform. The remittance report lists eleven employees, two of them anonymous, a processing fee you didn’t expect, and a corporate match folded into the total. Now someone has to put it into Altru in a way that finance can reconcile, development can report on, and donors get thanked correctly.
There’s no single “workplace giving” button in Altru. What there is: constituent records for people and organizations, revenue entry (ideally through batches), and whatever reporting fields your organization already uses. The work is mostly deciding a few rules once and then applying them the same way every time.
The decision that drives everything: who gets the gift?
Workplace gifts have two parties. The intermediary (the giving platform, United Way chapter, or employer) sends the money. The employee chose to give it. You have to decide which one the revenue sits on.
Option A: Record on the employee
Each named donor gets their own revenue record, with the intermediary noted (in a reference field, a note, or a code that identifies the channel). This is the better choice if you want giving history, renewal outreach, and donor counts to reflect real people. It’s also how most development teams want to see it.
Option B: Record on the intermediary organization
The full payment goes on an organization record for the platform or United Way chapter. This matches the money trail exactly and is simpler to reconcile, but your individual donors become invisible in giving history.
What most organizations end up doing
A hybrid: named donors are recorded on their own constituent records, and anonymous or unidentified portions are recorded on the intermediary’s organization record. Keep one organization record per intermediary (not one per check) so you can query total workplace giving by channel.
Altru’s underlying platform has concepts like matching gift claims and revenue recognition credits, but how much of that is available and configured in your database varies. Before building a process around soft credit or recognition, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support how your instance handles it.
Entering a disbursement step by step
- Start from the remittance report, not the deposit. Download the detail file from the platform or get the donor list from United Way. The deposit amount alone won’t tell you who gave.
- Look up every donor before you enter anything. Platforms often send work email addresses and legal names (“Robert” instead of “Bob”). Search by last name and address, not just email, or you’ll create duplicate constituents.
- Open a revenue batch for the whole disbursement. One batch per check or deposit keeps the batch total equal to what finance sees in the bank. Put the platform’s disbursement or check number in the batch description or each row’s reference field.
- Enter one row per donor, plus one row for any anonymous or unallocated remainder on the intermediary’s record.
- Code the channel consistently. Use whatever your organization relies on for reporting (an appeal, a source code, a revenue category, an attribute). The goal is a query that returns “all workplace giving this fiscal year” without anyone guessing.
- Commit the batch and confirm the total against the deposit before you close it out.
Fees: gross or net?
Many platforms deduct a processing fee before paying you. You have two honest options:
- Record net (what you actually received). Simplest, and the batch matches the bank.
- Record gross (what the donor gave) and have finance book the fee as an expense. Donors see the amount they remember giving, but your revenue in Altru won’t match the deposit without a journal entry on the finance side.
Pick one with your finance office and write it down. Mixing the two across years makes year-over-year comparisons meaningless.
Employer matches
When the platform includes a corporate match in the same payment, split it out. The match is the company’s gift, so record it on the employer’s organization record and link or note it to the employee’s gift if your setup allows. Recording the match as part of the employee’s gift inflates their giving history and can mislead future asks.
Payroll pledges
Some employees commit to an annual amount paid through payroll, and the intermediary forwards it monthly or quarterly. If you get the pledge amount up front, you can record a pledge and apply each disbursement as a payment. If you only learn about it as money arrives (common with United Way), record each payment as a gift and skip the pledge. Don’t create pledges you can’t track to completion; they’ll sit as open balances on reports for years.
Acknowledgments and tax language
The employee usually has their tax documentation already, from their pay stub or the giving platform. Your acknowledgment should be a genuine thank-you, but check with your finance or legal adviser about tax receipt wording so you don’t issue a second receipt for the same gift. A separate letter template for workplace gifts, driven by the channel code you set above, keeps this from going wrong.
For anonymous donors, nothing goes out. If the platform shares the employer but not the person, a thank-you to the company’s giving contact is often appreciated.
A short checklist to keep at the desk
- One organization record per intermediary.
- One batch per disbursement, with the check or disbursement ID.
- Named donors on their own records; anonymous remainder on the intermediary.
- Same channel code every time.
- Gross or net, agreed with finance.
- Matches recorded on the employer, not the employee.
- Workplace-specific acknowledgment template.
Quick answers
Should the intermediary be a constituent?
Yes. An organization record for each platform or United Way chapter gives you a place for anonymous funds and a way to report by channel.
What if a donor already gives directly too?
Record both on the same constituent. Your channel coding separates them in reports, and you get a complete picture of that person’s support.
How do I find all workplace gifts later?
Build a revenue query filtered on your channel code and date range. If you can’t build that query cleanly, your coding isn’t consistent yet.
