An event gets canceled, a camp session closes early, or a family can’t use the tickets they bought. You offer a refund, and a good share of people write back: “Keep it as a donation.” It’s a generous answer, and it creates a real accounting question in Altru. That money came in as earned revenue, attached to a ticket, registration, or program fee. Now it needs to live as a gift, credited to the right constituent and acknowledged correctly.
Altru has no single “change this sale into a donation” action that we know of. What you’re really doing is unwinding one transaction and recording another, and the right way to do it depends on whether the original revenue has been posted and on what your finance team needs to see.
Start with the donor’s intent, in writing
Before anyone touches a record, get the purchaser’s choice documented. An email reply is fine. You need it for three reasons:
- Tax receipts. A gift acknowledgment should reflect a voluntary contribution. “We decided to keep your camp fee” is not the same thing as “you chose to donate your camp fee.”
- Who gets credit. The person who paid may not be the person who wants the gift recognized (think of a grandparent paying for camp, or a company buying a block of tickets). Confirm the name.
- Audit trail. Six months from now, someone reconciling revenue will ask why a ticket sale turned into a gift. A note on the constituent record pointing to the written request settles it.
One more check: if the person received anything of value (they attended part of the program, kept a gift-shop item, or the original purchase was a package that included admission), only the portion they didn’t receive should become a gift. Your finance lead or auditor should make that call, not front-line staff.
The cleanest method: refund the sale, record a new gift
For most organizations, the approach that holds up best is two separate, clearly linked transactions:
- Reverse the original revenue. Process the refund or return on the ticket, registration, or program sale so earned revenue goes down by the right amount.
- Record a donation for the same amount on the constituent the donor named, using the fund or designation your team chose for these gifts.
- Make sure no money leaves the bank. This is the part to settle with finance before you start. The refund and the donation should net to zero cash. How you represent that depends on your payment method and GL setup. Some organizations use an internal or non-cash payment method agreed with accounting; others handle it through a journal entry. Don’t guess. Test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support how your configuration treats a refund that isn’t actually paid back to a card.
- Cross-reference the two. Put a note or reference on both transactions so anyone can see the gift came from a converted sale.
- Acknowledge the gift like any other donation, with wording that fits a converted payment (more on that below).
This keeps your earned revenue reports honest (the canceled event doesn’t look like it earned money it didn’t) and gives the donor a real gift on their giving history.
When a GL reclass is enough, and when it isn’t
Sometimes finance just wants the dollars moved from an earned-revenue account to a contributed-revenue account, and asks whether they can handle it with a journal entry in the accounting system. That moves the money on the books, but Altru won’t know a gift happened. The constituent shows no donation, nobody gets an acknowledgment, and your fundraising reports and queries won’t count it.
That can be acceptable if the amounts are small and nobody needs a receipt. If the donor expects an acknowledgment, or you want these gifts to show up in donor history, record the donation in Altru.
Handling a whole canceled program at once
One family converting a camp fee is a ten-minute task. Two hundred registrants for a canceled gala or summer session is a project. A few things make it manageable:
- Pull the list from a query. Build a query of everyone with revenue for the canceled event or program, including constituent, amount, payment method, and transaction date. That becomes your master worksheet.
- Offer clear choices. Typically: full refund, credit toward a future date, or convert to a donation. Collect responses in one place and add the choice back to your worksheet.
- Set a response deadline and decide in advance what happens to people who never reply. A default of “refund” is safer than a default of “donation.”
- Work in batches. Process conversions in groups and reconcile each batch against the worksheet before moving on. If your revenue posts to the GL in batches, coordinate timing with finance so refunds and gifts land in the same period.
- Use a dedicated fund or appeal for converted gifts so you can report on them separately later.
Packages and partial conversions
Packages are where this gets messy. If a guest bought admission plus a program and only the program was canceled, only that portion should become a donation. Refund the specific line item if Altru lets you do so cleanly in your setup; if not, refund the whole transaction and resell the portion the guest kept. Either way, check the result against the original receipt so the totals match.
Writing the acknowledgment
A standard “Thank you for your generous gift” letter is fine, but a line acknowledging the context lands better: “Thank you for choosing to donate your registration for the canceled spring session.” Make sure the tax language matches what the donor actually gave up, and that the gift date reflects when they made the decision, per your finance team’s policy.
Quick answers
Can I just edit the ticket transaction and change it to a donation?
Not that we’re aware of. Ticket and registration sales and donations are different transaction types in Altru, so plan on a reversal plus a new gift. If you find an approach in your environment that edits in place, test it in a sandbox and confirm with Blackbaud support before using it on live records.
What if the original revenue has already been posted?
The refund will typically post as its own adjustment in a later period. That’s normal, but tell finance so they expect it during reconciliation.
