Visa, Mastercard, and Discover tie out. American Express is short, sometimes by one transaction, sometimes by most of the day. Finance wants to know where the money went, and the deposit summary in Altru doesn’t explain it.
In most cases nothing is actually lost. Amex is the card brand most likely to take a different path from charge to bank, and the deposit summary only shows what Altru grouped into that deposit. The gap usually comes from one of a handful of causes, and you can rule them out in roughly this order.
1. Amex may not be funded the same way as your other cards
This is the first thing to confirm, because it changes how you read everything else. Some organizations accept Amex through the same merchant account as other cards, so Amex settles in the same batch and lands in the same bank deposit. Others have a separate American Express merchant agreement, where Amex pays the organization directly, on its own schedule, often as a separate bank deposit with its own fee handling.
If yours is the second kind, Amex charges will never line up neatly with the Visa/Mastercard deposit, and it’s normal for them to arrive on a different day. Your finance office or whoever signed the merchant paperwork can tell you which setup you have. If nobody knows, your payment processor’s support team can look it up, and Blackbaud support can tell you how your Altru merchant account is set up for Amex.
2. The payments aren’t in the deposit at all
The deposit summary reflects the payments that were added to that deposit, not every card payment taken that day. Common ways Amex payments get left out:
- Different source, different timing. Daily sales, advance sales, group sales, membership and donation web forms, and back-office revenue entry don’t always flow to deposits at the same moment. If your Amex volume skews toward one channel (online advance sales, for example), those payments may be landing in a different deposit or a later one.
- Uncommitted batches. Revenue still sitting in a batch that hasn’t been committed won’t appear where you expect it. Check for open batches from the date in question.
- Date cutoffs. A charge taken late in the evening, or online after midnight in the processor’s time zone, can belong to one day in Altru and another day at the processor. Look at the timestamps of the missing charges before assuming they disappeared.
3. The payment method or card type was recorded wrong
A deposit summary broken out by card type depends on each payment carrying the right card type. A few ways that goes wrong:
- A card was keyed manually and the card type was picked by hand, or left generic.
- A payment was recorded as “other” or a non-card method because a terminal was down and staff improvised.
- An Amex refund or partial refund was applied, so the net Amex figure is lower than the sum of the sales you remember.
To find these, run a revenue query for the date range, filtered to credit card payments, and output the payment method, card type, amount, transaction date, and the deposit each payment belongs to (if your query view exposes it). Sort by card type and look for Amex charges with a blank deposit, an unexpected card type, or a deposit from another date. That list is usually enough to explain the gap line by line.
4. The processor settled something different
Occasionally the difference is real at the processor level: an Amex authorization that never settled, a charge that was voided after the fact, or a dispute. Compare the processor’s settlement report for that day against your query output. Charges that exist in Altru but not in settlement are worth a closer look, since they may need to be reversed in Altru to keep revenue accurate.
A reconciliation routine that holds up
- Pull the processor’s settlement or funding report for the date, split by card brand.
- Run your Altru revenue query for the same date range with card type and deposit included.
- Match totals by brand. If only Amex is off, check the funding setup (section 1) before anything else.
- For the leftover difference, match individual transactions by amount and time.
- Write down anything you fixed (card type corrected, payment moved to the right deposit, refund noted), so the next reconciliation doesn’t rediscover the same issue.
Save the query. Once it exists, a monthly check takes minutes, and you’ll see quickly whether the Amex gap is a one-off or a pattern tied to a particular sales channel or workstation.
What’s worth confirming with Blackbaud
Exactly how Altru assigns online payments to deposits, and whether card type comes from the processor or from staff entry, can depend on your configuration and merchant setup. If the query shows Amex payments consistently missing from deposits while other brands from the same channel are included, that pattern is specific enough to bring to Blackbaud support. Include a few example transactions, the dates, and the deposit you expected them in. Test any fix in a sandbox or on a single day’s deposit before changing how future deposits are built.
Quick answers
Does a missing Amex charge mean the guest wasn’t charged?
Not usually. Check the processor’s settlement report first. If the charge settled there, the money exists and the issue is how it was grouped or labeled in Altru.
Why does Amex arrive in our bank a day or two after the other cards?
That is common when Amex funds you directly under its own merchant agreement rather than through your main processor. It’s a timing difference, not a shortage.
Should we edit the deposit to force the totals to match?
Only after you’ve identified the specific payments. Adjusting a deposit to hit a number, without knowing which transactions caused the gap, makes the next reconciliation harder.
