Popcorn, bottled water, a bag of animal feed, a coffee at the café cart. Concessions are small sales, but there are a lot of them, and the first question most Altru administrators face is a basic one: should these go through Altru at all?
There’s no single right answer. It depends on what you’re selling, who runs the stand, and what finance needs to see. This guide walks through the three setups organizations actually use, what each one costs you in staff time and reporting, and what to confirm before you commit.
First, decide what “concessions” means at your site
Before touching any configuration, sort your items into groups. The right setup is often different for each:
- Add-ons sold with admission, such as animal feed cups, carousel rides, or a film or planetarium upgrade. These are usually bought at the same counter as tickets.
- Food and drink you run yourself, at a café, kiosk, or snack window staffed by your own people.
- Food service run by an outside vendor, where the caterer keeps the register and pays you a commission or rent.
The first group almost always belongs in Altru. The third almost never does. The middle group is where the real decision lives.
Option 1: Sell concession items in Altru daily sales
If the item is sold at your admissions counter, ringing it up in the same Altru transaction as the ticket is usually the cleanest choice. The guest pays once, the revenue lands in Altru alongside admission, and your daily sales reports include it without anyone reconciling a second system.
How you set the item up depends on your Altru configuration. Some organizations use merchandise or product-type items if their Altru setup supports them; others set up a low-cost program, an add-on, or a fee that can be added to an order. Altru’s options here have changed over time and vary by what your organization has licensed and configured, so check in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support which item types are available to you before building anything.
Things to settle up front:
- Price and tax. Food and merchandise are often taxed differently from admission. Make sure the item carries the correct tax setting, and have finance sign off on it.
- GL mapping. Give concessions their own revenue account so they don’t blur into admissions. Fixing this after a season of sales is painful.
- Naming. Use short, obvious names (“Feed Cup”, “Water 16oz”) so cashiers can find them fast and reports read clearly.
- Inventory. Don’t assume Altru will track stock counts for these items. If you need on-hand counts, confirm whether your setup supports it; if not, keep a simple count sheet or spreadsheet at the stand.
The downside: Altru’s sales screens are built around ticketing and memberships. For a line of guests buying only a soda and a pretzel, the workflow can feel slower than a dedicated food register. Time a few test transactions with real staff before rolling it out.
Option 2: Use a separate POS and post summary revenue to Altru
Many sites run their café or snack bar on a restaurant or retail point-of-sale system and keep Altru for admissions, memberships, and donations. This is common, and it’s not a failure of planning. Food service needs things like modifiers, quick-tap menus, and kitchen tickets that a ticketing system isn’t designed for.
If you go this way, decide how concession revenue reaches your books:
- Finance records it directly from the POS reports, and Altru never sees it. Simplest, but your Altru revenue reports won’t show total earned revenue per visit.
- Someone enters a daily or weekly summary into Altru, for example as a single revenue entry or batch against a house or “concessions” constituent with its own designation or GL account. This keeps Altru reporting closer to complete without entering every coffee.
Either way, write down who does it, how often, and which report they pull from. Summary entries that depend on one person’s memory tend to stop in month three.
One trade-off to accept: with a separate POS, you won’t know which members or ticket buyers also bought food. If that connection matters to you (say, for member discount analysis), a separate system makes it harder.
Option 3: Outside vendor runs it
When a caterer operates food service, their sales are their sales. What you typically record is the commission or rent they pay you, and that’s usually handled by finance as ordinary revenue. Altru doesn’t need individual transactions here. If the vendor honors a member discount, agree on how they’ll verify membership at their register, since they won’t have access to your Altru data.
Member discounts on concessions
This comes up with every option. If concession items are sold in Altru, check whether your membership benefits or discount setup can apply to those items the same way they apply to admission or the gift shop. Test it in a sandbox with an actual member record before promising it in your membership brochure. If concessions run on another system, the usual approach is a simple visual check of the member card and a discount key on that register.
Before opening day
- Run a full test sale, refund, and end-of-day close with concession items included.
- Pull your daily sales and revenue reports and confirm concessions show where finance expects.
- Give cashiers a one-page sheet with item names, prices, and what to do when an item isn’t on the screen.
- After the first week, compare Altru (or POS) totals against deposits. Small mismatches early point to a setup issue, not a cashier issue.
Quick answers
Can Altru handle a full café?
It can record the revenue, but it isn’t built as a restaurant register. Most sites with a real café use a separate food POS and keep Altru for admissions and memberships.
What’s the smallest workable setup?
Add a handful of add-on items to the admissions counter in Altru, give them their own GL account, and leave everything else to finance. You can expand later once you see how much volume there is.
