PayPal donations cause trouble in Altru for one simple reason: the money and the record can take different routes. A gift may show up in Altru from an online form, show up in PayPal’s dashboard, land in your bank as part of a lump deposit, or all three, and each one reports a slightly different amount on a slightly different date. Reconciling gets much easier once you sort out which route each gift actually took.
Start by separating the two kinds of PayPal gifts
Before you touch a batch, figure out where the gift began.
- Gifts made on your Altru online forms (Online Express). The donor picked PayPal as a payment option on a form you built in Altru. Altru already has a transaction for these. Whether PayPal is offered on your forms at all depends on your Blackbaud Merchant Services account and form setup, so if you aren’t sure, check with Blackbaud support before you build a process around it.
- Gifts that never touched Altru. A “Donate” button on a social post, a PayPal link in an old email, PayPal Giving Fund payouts, or someone sending money to your PayPal email address. Altru knows nothing about these until somebody enters them.
Mixing these two groups is where most double entries come from. Someone sees a donation in the PayPal dashboard, enters it in a gift batch, and doesn’t realize the same gift already came in through an online form.
Processing gifts from your online forms
Online form transactions arrive in Altru with the donor information the person typed in. The work on your side is mostly matching and review:
- Review incoming transactions on a regular schedule. Daily or a few times a week is better than monthly. Small problems, like a donor using a different email than the one on file, are much easier to fix when they’re fresh.
- Check constituent matching. Make sure each gift attached to the right record and didn’t create a new duplicate. PayPal accounts often use a spouse’s name or a business email, so the name on the gift may not match the person you know.
- Confirm the designation and appeal. If your form maps to a default fund, make sure tribute gifts or restricted gifts got the right designation before they’re posted.
- Look at the payment method. Make sure PayPal gifts are identifiable in Altru, whether through the payment method itself or a consistent note or attribute. You’ll need to pull them out as a group at month end.
Entering PayPal gifts that came from outside Altru
For gifts that started outside your forms, enter them through a normal revenue batch so they get reviewed before posting. A few habits help:
- Record the PayPal transaction ID on each gift in a reference or note field. It’s the only reliable way to prove later that a gift was or wasn’t entered.
- Use the date the donor gave, not the date the money reached your bank, unless your finance office has a different rule. Agree on this once and stick to it.
- Use the same payment method or attribute you use for online form PayPal gifts, plus something that marks them as “external,” so you can report on each group separately.
- Search before you create. PayPal gives you an email address and a name. Look up both before adding a new constituent.
For PayPal Giving Fund and similar platforms, the donor may not be shared with you, and the gift legally comes from the fund rather than the individual. Talk with your finance team about how to record soft credit and acknowledgments in those cases. This is an accounting policy question, not an Altru setting.
Reconciling: a three-way match
Reconciliation means three sources agree: what Altru says you received, what PayPal (or your merchant account) says it processed, and what actually hit the bank. A monthly routine looks like this:
- Export the PayPal activity for the month, filtered to completed payments, refunds, and fees.
- Run an Altru query of PayPal gifts for the same date range, including the transaction date, amount, payment method, and any reference field where you store the PayPal ID.
- Match gift by gift on transaction ID where you have it, and on amount plus date where you don’t. A spreadsheet with both lists side by side works fine.
- Explain every leftover. Anything in PayPal and not in Altru is a missed entry. Anything in Altru and not in PayPal is either a duplicate, a gift that really came through a different payment method, or a timing difference at the edge of the month.
- Tie the totals to the bank deposits. Deposits are usually net of fees and may combine several days, so match totals by deposit, not by gift.
Fees, refunds, and timing
Most mismatches fall into these three buckets:
- Fees. Altru generally records the gross gift, the amount the donor gave and the amount on their receipt. PayPal deposits arrive net of fees. Your finance team records the fee as an expense; don’t lower the gift amount in Altru to match the deposit.
- Refunds and disputes. A refund in PayPal doesn’t automatically reverse the gift in Altru unless your setup handles it. Check refunds every month and adjust or reverse the matching revenue so your giving totals and the donor’s history stay accurate.
- Timing. A gift made late on the last day of the month may land in different periods in each system. Keep a short “in transit” list and clear it the next month.
Confirm what your account actually does
How PayPal payments from Online Express settle, whether they come through your Blackbaud Merchant Services disbursements or a separate PayPal balance, depends on how your account was set up, and it’s worth confirming rather than assuming. Ask Blackbaud support how PayPal transactions on your forms are deposited and what reports show them. Then run a few small test gifts and follow each one from the form to the batch to the bank. One afternoon of tracing usually answers more than a month of guessing.
Quick answers
Should I record PayPal gifts at the gross or net amount?
Gross, in almost every case. The donor gave the full amount, and their receipt and giving history should reflect it. Fees are tracked separately in your accounting system.
How do I stop PayPal gifts from being entered twice?
Store the PayPal transaction ID on every gift and search for it before entering a new one. Also make sure the people entering external gifts know which gifts already arrive through your online forms.
Can I just shut off outside PayPal links?
Often that’s the cleanest fix. Track down old donate buttons and links and point them at your Altru forms instead, so as many gifts as possible arrive with a record already attached.
