A tote bag goes to a visiting speaker. A box of plush animals goes to the education team for a school program. The development director grabs three signed books as thank-you gifts for major donors. None of it was sold, but all of it left the shelf, and at month end someone in finance asks why the store’s inventory count doesn’t match what was rung up.
Gifted merchandise is a small problem that turns into a reconciliation headache when nobody decides how to record it. The good news: you don’t need a special feature in Altru to handle it well. You need one consistent method, a reason code, and an agreement with your finance team about where the cost lands.
First, sort out what kind of “gift” it is
Not all free merchandise is the same from an accounting point of view. Before choosing how to record it, group your giveaways into buckets, because each one usually ends up in a different place in the books:
- Donor and member thank-you gifts. Items given in connection with a donation or membership. These can matter for donor acknowledgments, because the value of what the donor received may reduce the deductible portion of their gift.
- Program and operational use. Merchandise pulled for education programs, events, or exhibits. This is really an internal transfer of cost from the store to a program budget.
- Promotional and hospitality gifts. Press, speakers, partners, VIP visitors. Usually a marketing or hospitality expense.
- Staff and volunteer gifts. Appreciation items. Depending on value and policy, your finance team may treat these differently.
- Damaged, expired, or lost stock. Not a gift at all, but often lumped in. Keep it separate so shrink doesn’t hide inside “giveaways.”
How each bucket should be treated for tax and audit purposes is a question for your accountant or auditor, not your store manager. What Altru can do is give them clean, consistent data to work from.
Two ways to record it in Altru
Option 1: Ring it through as a zero-dollar sale
Process the item through daily sales like any other merchandise sale, then apply a 100% discount or price override, depending on what your setup allows. The benefit is that the transaction leaves a clear trail: date, item, quantity, who processed it, and the discount used. If you track inventory in Altru, the count should come down the same way it would for a paid sale.
To make this work, create a dedicated discount for each gift bucket, for example “Merch gift – donor,” “Merch gift – program,” “Merch gift – promo.” Don’t reuse a general staff discount or a “manager comp” discount. If everything is coded the same, finance can’t separate a donor premium from a broken mug.
Before rolling this out, test it in your sandbox or on a low-traffic register. Confirm that a fully discounted merchandise sale behaves the way you expect: that it completes without a payment, that inventory decrements, and that it appears in your sales and discount reports. If anything looks off, Blackbaud support can tell you how your version handles it.
Option 2: Adjust inventory directly
If your organization manages merchandise inventory in Altru, you may be able to record a quantity adjustment instead of a sale. This is cleaner for bulk pulls (a whole case going to an event) and keeps zero-dollar transactions out of your sales reports.
The trade-off is visibility. Adjustments are often less detailed than a transaction, so you’ll want a reason or note attached to each one. If your store uses a separate retail or inventory system rather than Altru for stock counts, this step belongs there instead, and Altru only needs to know about items tied to donors or members.
Many organizations use both: zero-dollar sales for individual gifts handed out at the desk, inventory adjustments for bulk transfers to programs.
Getting the cost to the right account
A zero-dollar sale records the item leaving, but it doesn’t by itself move the item’s cost into a marketing, program, or fundraising expense. That part usually happens in your accounting system, using a report from Altru.
A workable monthly routine:
- Run a query or report of merchandise transactions that used your gift discounts (or inventory adjustments with gift reasons) for the month.
- Group the results by discount or reason so each bucket has a quantity and a retail value.
- Have the store or finance team apply item cost to those quantities.
- Finance posts a journal entry moving that cost from merchandise inventory or cost of goods to the right expense lines.
If your Altru general ledger setup already maps discounts to specific accounts, check with finance whether those mappings are what they want for gift discounts. Don’t assume; look at what actually posts in a test batch.
Donor gifts need one more step
When merchandise goes to a donor as part of a gift, the record on the merchandise side isn’t enough. The donor’s revenue record should also reflect what they received, so acknowledgment letters and receipts state the correct deductible amount. In Altru that typically means recording the benefit on the donation itself. Who handles this, and at what value threshold, should be decided with your development and finance teams together.
Controls that keep it honest
- Limit gift discounts to the staff roles that actually give items away.
- Require a short note on each gift transaction: who received it and why.
- Review the monthly gift report with the store manager. A sudden spike in “promo” gifts is worth a conversation.
- Write the policy on one page: which bucket, which discount, who approves, and who posts the journal entry.
Quick answers
Does Altru have a built-in “comp merchandise” function?
Not that we’d rely on as a single switch. Most organizations build it from discounts, inventory adjustments, and queries. Confirm what your configuration supports in a sandbox before training staff.
Should gifted items show up in store sales totals?
Usually finance prefers they don’t inflate unit counts without context. Report gift transactions separately, or filter them out of sales reports by discount.
What value do we use for a donor premium?
Generally fair market value, not your cost, but confirm the rule with your accountant before it goes on acknowledgment letters.
