Ask any cashier who has worked a register with forty identical gray buttons on it, and they’ll tell you why color matters. Adult General Admission sits next to Adult Member Guest, the Senior and Student buttons look the same, and the add-on for the special exhibit is somewhere on the second row. Color is the fastest way for a person to find the right button without reading it, so it’s natural to want to set colors on the Altru Daily Sales screen.
The short answer: we’re not aware of any built-in setting in Altru that lets an administrator pick a color for individual Daily Sales buttons. That’s a limitation of the product, not something hidden in your configuration. You can, however, make the screen much easier to scan with the tools Altru does give you, and that usually solves the problem color was meant to solve.
Confirm it for your own install first
Altru is updated on Blackbaud’s schedule, and features do change. Before you spend time on workarounds, take ten minutes to check:
- Look through the configuration areas you already use to set up Daily Sales (programs, price types, sales methods, and any layout options for the sales screen) for anything related to appearance.
- Search the current Altru help documentation for “daily sales” along with “color” or “layout.”
- If you still aren’t sure, open a case with Blackbaud support and ask directly whether button color is configurable in your version. Their answer is the one to trust.
If support confirms it can’t be done, here’s what tends to work instead.
Ways to make Daily Sales easier to read without color
1. Cut the number of buttons
Color is usually requested because the screen is crowded. Before anything else, look at what’s actually on it. Retired programs, last season’s special events, and price types nobody has sold in a year all add noise. Removing or deactivating what you no longer sell (after checking that you won’t break reporting on past sales) often helps more than color would.
2. Use naming as your color code
Button labels are fully in your control, and a consistent naming pattern does a lot of the work color would do. A few patterns that hold up well:
- Lead with the category. “GA – Adult,” “GA – Child,” “MEM – Guest Pass,” “EVT – Night Hike.” Staff learn to scan the first two or three characters.
- Put the distinguishing word first. “Member Adult” and “Adult Member Guest” are easy to confuse; “Guest of Member – Adult” is not.
- Keep labels short. If text wraps or truncates on your register screens, the important part should come first.
Write the convention down so whoever builds next year’s programs follows it.
3. Control the order and grouping
Where Altru lets you set sort order for programs and price types, use it deliberately. Put your highest-volume items in the same spot every time, keep members’ items together, and push rarely used items to the end. Muscle memory is faster than color once staff know that general admission always lives in the top-left.
4. Look at what each user or register sees
A front desk that sells admission and memberships doesn’t need the same buttons as a group sales coordinator or the gift shop. Depending on how your organization is set up, you may be able to narrow what appears through sales methods, security roles, or separate workstations. Test any change in a sandbox or with a test user before rolling it out, because permissions in Altru can affect more than the sales screen.
5. Add color outside the software
This sounds low-tech, but it works:
- A laminated one-page cheat sheet at each register, color-coded by category, that mirrors the button order on screen.
- Colored tape or dot stickers on the bezel of a touch screen, lined up with button rows, if your layout stays stable.
- Matching colors on your posted admission price board, so the sign a guest points to matches the cheat sheet the cashier uses.
The catch is upkeep. Any time you add, remove, or reorder buttons, the sticker and sheet have to change too, so assign that to whoever owns Daily Sales setup.
Measure whether the confusion is real
It’s worth checking how often the wrong button is actually pressed. Run a query or report on Daily Sales refunds, exchanges, and voided transactions over the last few months and look for pairs of items that get swapped. If “Senior” and “Student” keep getting corrected, that tells you exactly which labels or positions to fix first. If the error rate is low, the issue may be speed and training rather than layout.
Quick answers
Can I change the font size or theme of the Daily Sales screen? We don’t know of an Altru setting for that. Browser zoom on the register workstation can make everything larger, but test it first, since it can push buttons off screen.
Is there a way to add icons or images to buttons? Not that we’re aware of. Clear, consistent labels are the reliable option today.
How often should we revisit the layout? Before each season or major exhibit opening is a good rhythm. That’s when new programs get added and old ones should be cleared out.
