A school books a field trip with a lunch add-on. Weeks later the same reservation picks up a private animal encounter and a second bus. Your sales coordinator now needs a signed contract for the teacher, a separate deposit agreement for the district’s business office, and a banquet event order (BEO) for the café team listing headcount, meal times, and dietary notes. That’s three documents, each for a different reader, all coming from one group reservation in Altru.
Altru’s group sales area is built around the reservation as the central record, and it can produce merged confirmations and contracts from reservation data. Where teams get stuck is going past one standard document per reservation: different templates for different audiences, revised versions after changes, or an operational sheet that looks nothing like a customer-facing contract. Below is how to think about it and what holds up in practice.
First, confirm what your Altru setup already supports
Before building workarounds, find out exactly what your database does today. Configuration differs between organizations, and Blackbaud updates Altru over time, so don’t rely on what a colleague at another institution told you.
- Check how many document templates are set up for group sales. If you can keep more than one template and pick which one to generate, you may already have most of what you need. Build a “Contract,” a “Deposit Agreement,” and a “BEO” template and test generating each against the same reservation.
- Check which fields the merge can reach. Itinerary items, times, locations, and resources are what a BEO depends on. If the merge only exposes header-level fields (group name, date, contact, totals), an internal event sheet will be thin.
- Check where generated documents end up. Find out whether a generated or signed file can be saved somewhere tied to the reservation or the group’s constituent record, or whether it only exists on someone’s desktop.
If you’re not sure about any of these, test in a sandbox or training environment if you have one, and ask Blackbaud support directly: “Can we keep multiple merge templates for group reservations, and which reservation and itinerary fields can each template use?” Their answer for your version settles the question faster than guessing.
Option 1: Separate templates, one reservation
When your setup allows several templates, this is the cleanest route. Make each template serve a single audience:
- Customer contract: pricing, payment terms, cancellation policy, signature lines. No internal notes.
- Deposit or invoice letter: amounts due, due dates, how to pay. Often goes to a different contact than the trip organizer.
- BEO / event sheet: schedule by time block, room or area, headcount, meals, dietary needs, staffing, setup notes. No prices unless your culinary or events team needs them.
Name the templates so nobody grabs the wrong one (“GS – Contract – Customer” versus “GS – BEO – Internal”), and keep internal notes in fields the customer contract never merges.
Option 2: Query plus Word mail merge
When the built-in merge can’t reach the fields you need, or you can only keep one template, build a query over group reservations that returns the fields for one document type, export it, and run a Word mail merge with your own layout.
This works well for BEOs in particular, since they usually need itinerary-level rows (one line per activity or meal), not one line per reservation. In Word, you can group rows by reservation so each event gets its own page.
Trade-offs to be honest about:
- It’s a manual export each time. Rerun it the day before the event so the BEO reflects final counts.
- The output lives outside Altru unless you save it back somewhere tied to the record.
- Anyone editing the query can break the layout, so restrict who can change it.
Option 3: Version the contract when the reservation changes
Many “we need multiple contracts” situations are really about amendments. The group added fifty students, and the original signed contract no longer matches. Rather than overwriting, produce a new document each time terms change and label it clearly: “Contract v2 – revised headcount,” with the date. Keep every signed version, whether as attachments where your setup allows or in a shared folder named by reservation number. A quick note on the reservation (“v2 contract sent 10/14, signed 10/16”) keeps the trail readable for whoever picks up the booking next.
Keeping the BEO accurate
An event order is only useful if it matches what’s actually happening. A few habits help:
- Set a freeze date. Final counts locked a set number of days before the visit, after which changes go through the sales coordinator only.
- Generate the BEO last. Customer contracts go out early. The internal sheet should be produced after the freeze date, not when the booking is first made.
- Put dietary and accessibility details in consistent fields. Free-text notes scattered across the reservation are easy to miss in a merge. Pick one place and train staff to use it.
- Distribute it the same way every time. One shared folder or one email list per department, so kitchen and floor staff know where to look.
Quick answers
Can one group reservation have more than one contract in Altru?
It depends on how your group sales documents are configured. Test generating more than one template against a single reservation in a sandbox, and confirm with Blackbaud support if the results are unclear. If you can’t, the query-and-mail-merge route gets you there.
Should the BEO be the same document as the contract?
Generally no. Customers don’t need staffing and setup notes, and your kitchen doesn’t need payment terms. Separate documents keep both readable.
Where should signed contracts be stored?
As close to the reservation as your setup allows. If Altru can’t hold the file against the reservation in your configuration, use a consistent folder naming scheme keyed to the reservation number and note on the record where it lives.
