“Mark that ticket inactive” can mean four different things in Altru, and each one is handled in a different place. Usually someone is trying to retire a price that shouldn’t be sold anymore, pull a program off the website or the register, shut down one event time, or stop a ticket that was already sold from being used. Work out which of those you mean first. Changing the wrong thing either does nothing or affects a lot more than you expected.
Start with the question: what should stop happening?
- Nobody should be able to buy this price anymore (a retired “Senior” rate, a promo that ended). That’s a price type question.
- This whole program should stop being sold (last season’s exhibit, a discontinued tour). That’s a program question.
- One date or time slot shouldn’t be sold (a cancelled 2:00 tour, a closed holiday). That’s an event or schedule question.
- A ticket someone already bought shouldn’t work. That’s a sales transaction question, and it’s handled very differently.
Retiring a price type
Price types are the labels attached to ticket prices, like Adult, Child, or Member. Once a price type has been used in sales, you generally can’t delete it, because historical transactions point to it. Inactivating it is the normal way to retire it while keeping your reporting intact.
Two things to check before you do it:
- Where it’s still attached. A price type can be on several programs and price lists. Removing it from the programs where it shouldn’t be offered is often the cleaner move, especially if one program still uses it.
- Whether inactivating it hides it everywhere you expect. Behavior at daily sales, advance sales, group sales, and on web forms isn’t always identical. After the change, test a sale in each channel you use. If you have a sandbox or test database, try it there first.
Taking a whole program out of circulation
When an exhibit closes or a tour is discontinued, you want it gone from the register and the website, but you still want last year’s attendance and revenue to report correctly. Don’t delete a program that has sales against it, even if Altru lets you start the process.
There are usually two levers here:
- Sales methods. Each program is set up for the ways it can be sold, such as daily sales, advance sales, or online. Removing a sales method takes the program out of that channel without touching anything else. This is useful when you want to stop online sales but still let staff sell it at the desk for a while.
- Inactivating the program. This is the full retirement. Your version may or may not offer an inactive status on every program type. If you don’t see one, ask Blackbaud support or check the current Altru help documentation rather than working around it.
Also check your web forms. A form that lists programs directly may need to be edited or unpublished on its own. Don’t assume it updates itself.
Closing a single date or time
For scheduled programs, the event is the unit you’re really working with. If a time slot shouldn’t be sold, you can usually cancel the event or reduce its capacity so nothing is left to sell. The right choice depends on whether tickets have already been sold:
- No sales yet: removing or cancelling the event is straightforward.
- Tickets already sold: run a query or report on that event first so you have a contact list. Then decide whether you’re refunding or moving those guests to another time, and do that before you change the event.
For one-off closures, like weather or a private rental, setting capacity to zero is often less disruptive than cancelling, because the event and its history stay in place. Test it to confirm the slot shows as unavailable in every channel you sell through.
Stopping a ticket that was already sold
This one trips people up. You generally don’t “inactivate” an individual sold ticket. You change the sale itself, through a refund, an exchange, or whatever your organization’s process is for voided orders. That keeps your revenue, batches, and attendance in sync.
Whether a refunded ticket’s barcode is rejected at the door depends on how you scan. Test this specifically: refund a test ticket, then try to scan it. If it still gets in, your desk staff need a manual check until you’ve sorted out the scanning side.
A short cleanup routine
If you’re tidying up a whole season of old tickets at once, a little order saves a lot of grief:
- List what’s being retired: price types, programs, and any future events.
- Query for any future-dated sales against those items. Deal with those guests first.
- Remove sales methods or price types from programs, then inactivate whatever is fully retired.
- Check every web form and any links on your website that point to those programs.
- Do a test sale in each channel and confirm the retired items are really gone.
- Run one of your standard attendance or revenue reports for last season to confirm the history still shows correctly.
Quick answers
Can I just delete old tickets instead?
Only if nothing has ever been sold against them. Once sales exist, inactivating or removing them from sales channels keeps your reports accurate. Deleting, when it’s allowed at all, can leave gaps.
Will inactivating a price type change past transactions?
It shouldn’t. Historical sales keep the price type they were sold under. If a report looks different afterward, check whether it filters to active records only.
Can I reactivate something later?
Usually, yes. That’s one more reason to inactivate rather than delete. Confirm in your own database before you rely on it for a seasonal program that comes back every year.
