A donor gives $100 through an online giving platform. Two weeks later the payout lands in your bank account as $96.80, with the platform’s cut already gone. Now someone has to put that gift into Altru, and the question is simple to ask and easy to get wrong: do you enter $100 or $96.80?
The short answer for most organizations: record the gift at the full amount the donor gave, and account for the fee as an expense outside the gift. The rest of this article explains why, how to make the numbers tie out with your bank deposit, and the few situations where the answer is different.
Why the gift should be the gross amount
The donor gave $100. That’s what they’ll expect to see on their acknowledgment, what should count toward their giving history, and what should count toward a campaign or appeal goal. The $3.20 is a cost your organization paid to collect the money, the same way a credit card processing fee is a cost of selling a ticket.
If you enter $96.80 instead, a few things drift out of line:
- Acknowledgments understate the gift. A thank-you letter for $96.80 to someone who gave $100 invites a confused phone call, and it may not match what the platform’s own receipt told them.
- Giving history and lifetime totals are off. Small differences add up across hundreds of gifts and quietly affect giving-level segments and major gift screening.
- Fundraising revenue looks lower and fee expense disappears. Your finance team and auditors generally want to see both the revenue and the cost, not one number netted into the other.
Accounting treatment is ultimately your finance team’s call, and the tax side is a question for your CPA. But gross-in-Altru is the common, defensible default, and it’s worth confirming with finance before you change anything.
Entering the gift
Enter the donation in Altru the way you normally would, typically through a revenue batch, with these details:
- Amount: the gross amount the donor gave, taken from the platform’s transaction report, not from the bank deposit.
- Date: the date the donor made the gift, unless your finance policy says to use the payout date. Pick one rule and stick with it.
- Payment method and a reference: use a consistent payment method or source code for each platform, and put the platform’s transaction or payout ID in a reference field or note. You’ll need it when reconciling.
- Designation and appeal: code these the same as any other gift so reports stay comparable.
Keep one batch per payout where you can. When a batch maps to exactly one deposit, reconciliation becomes a matter of comparing two totals.
Handling the fee
This is where organizations differ, and where you should check what your Altru setup actually supports. I’m not aware of a standard field on an Altru donation payment that records a deducted fee and automatically produces a net deposit. If you think your configuration does this, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before building a process around it.
The approaches that work reliably:
Book the fee in your accounting system
Altru records the $100 gift. Finance records the deposit of $96.80 and a journal entry for $3.20 to a merchant or platform fee expense account. This keeps Altru clean and puts the fee where the expense belongs. It’s the simplest option for most teams.
Use a clearing account if you post from Altru to the GL
If your revenue posts from Altru to your general ledger, the gross gift will hit a clearing or undeposited funds account. Finance then clears it with the net deposit plus the fee expense. Your GL mapping decides exactly how this flows, so involve whoever maintains it before the first payout arrives.
Making it tie out every payout
For each payout, three numbers should agree:
- The gross total of the gifts in your Altru batch or query for that payout
- The fee total on the platform’s payout report
- The bank deposit, which should equal gross minus fees
A saved revenue query filtered by payment method or source code and date range makes this a two-minute check. When the numbers don’t match, the usual causes are a refunded gift, a gift that landed in the next payout, or a platform that charges a flat monthly fee separately from per-gift fees.
When the answer changes
The donor covered the fee. If the donor chose to add $3 so you’d receive the full $100, they gave $103. Record $103 as the gift. The fee is still your expense; it just happens to be offset.
The platform is legally the donor. Some giving platforms and donor-advised funds collect the money themselves, issue the tax receipt, and then grant it to you, sometimes net of their fee. In that case the gift may properly come from the intermediary, not the individual. Many organizations record the payment from the intermediary and note the individual on their constituent record so they’re still thanked and tracked. Confirm the right treatment with finance, because it affects both acknowledgments and revenue reporting.
You don’t know the gross amount. If a platform only reports net payouts with no transaction detail, you may have no choice but to record what you received. Document that exception, use a distinct source code so those gifts are easy to find, and push the platform for a transaction-level report.
Write the rule down
Whatever you decide, put it in a one-page procedure: which amount goes into Altru, which date, which payment method code per platform, where the payout ID goes, and who books the fee. Fee handling tends to break when the person who set it up leaves, so the written rule matters more than the specific choice.
