It’s the first of the month, and the group sales coordinator has forty school and tour reservations on the books. Some paid a deposit, some paid nothing, a few paid in full. Finance wants every one that still owes money to get an invoice this week. Opening each reservation and printing one at a time is how most people start, and it’s how most people burn an afternoon.
Altru can produce an invoice for a group sales reservation, but producing a whole stack of them in one pass for “everyone with a balance due” is a different job. How far your version takes you natively is worth confirming before you build a workaround. This guide covers how to check, and what to do if the answer is “not really.”
Step one: confirm what your Altru can do in bulk
Blackbaud changes Altru over time, and organizations configure group sales differently, so don’t rely on what a colleague at another museum told you. Spend fifteen minutes checking for yourself:
- Look at the group sales area and any related reports. Check whether there is a report or process that accepts a selection of reservations rather than a single one. If a report can be pointed at a query or selection, that is your bulk path.
- Search Blackbaud’s knowledge base for invoices and group sales reservations. Their articles reflect the current behavior better than any third-party guide, this one included.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly: “Can I print invoices for multiple group sales reservations at once, filtered to those with a balance due?” A yes or no from them saves you from building something you don’t need.
- Test in a sandbox if you have one, especially before running anything against live reservations.
If you find a native bulk option, use it, and keep the query described below as your filter. If you don’t, the approach that follows works with tools you already have.
Step two: build a “balance due” query you can trust
Everything downstream depends on getting the right list. Build a group sales reservation query that returns only reservations still owing money. Useful output fields usually include:
- Reservation name or number
- Group contact name, organization, mailing address, and email
- Event or visit date
- Reservation total, amount paid, and balance due
- Payment due date, if you track one
Filter on balance greater than zero, and decide how to handle a few cases before you send anything:
- Cancelled reservations that still show a balance. Exclude them, or you’ll invoice a school that called off the trip.
- Visits that already happened versus upcoming ones. These often need different wording, and some teams handle past-due balances by phone first.
- Reservations under a small threshold, such as a few dollars left from a headcount change. Decide whether those get an invoice or a write-off.
Spot-check five or six results against the reservation records. If the balance in the query doesn’t match what you see on the reservation, fix the query before you go further. Save it so you can rerun it every billing cycle.
Step three: turn the list into invoices
Without a native bulk invoice, the most dependable route is a mail merge:
- Export the query to a spreadsheet.
- Create a Word invoice template with your logo, remit-to address, payment instructions, and merge fields for each column in the export.
- Merge to a single document so you get one invoice per page, ready to print or save as PDF.
- Merge to email for groups that prefer it, using the contact email from the query. Schools in particular often route invoices to a business office, so check that the address you have is the one that pays.
Give each invoice a clear reference, such as the reservation number, so that when a check arrives the person posting the payment can match it to the right reservation without guessing.
Step four: record that you sent them
An invoice that nobody can see in Altru tends to get sent twice or not followed up at all. After each run, note the send on the reservation or the group contact’s constituent record in whatever way your team already uses for interactions or notes. Rerun the same query the following month and you’ll have your follow-up list, already filtered to who still hasn’t paid.
Where this process tends to break
- Stale exports. A payment posted after you exported won’t be reflected. Export the morning you send, not the week before.
- Payment applied to the wrong place. If a group’s payment lands as general revenue instead of against the reservation, the balance never clears and they keep getting invoices. Train whoever posts checks to apply them to the reservation.
- Paper slows everything down. A printed invoice means waiting for a check, then hand entry. Including a way to pay online usually shortens the cycle.
Making the invoice easier to pay
That last point is where Social Good’s Link2Pay fits. It creates a branded pay-by-link for group sales, invoices, and deposits, and the payment posts to Altru. You can drop the link onto the printed or emailed invoice, so the group can pay by card instead of mailing a check, and you skip the manual entry on your end.
Quick answers
Can I just print each reservation’s invoice individually?
Yes, and for a handful of groups that’s fine. The query and merge approach pays off once you’re invoicing more than you can comfortably open one by one, and it gives you a repeatable list for follow-up.
Should I send invoices before or after the visit?
That’s a policy decision, not an Altru one. Many organizations invoice the balance a set number of days before the visit and follow up afterward on anything still open. Whatever you choose, build the date logic into your query so every run is consistent.
