A family bought tickets for the 10:00 entry, hit traffic, and walks up at 11:30. You let them in, because of course you do. The scanner flags the ticket as the wrong time slot, someone waves it through, and now your attendance numbers say the 10:00 slot was full and the 11:30 slot had room it didn’t actually have.
Multiply that by a few dozen late arrivals, early arrivals, and “we bought for Saturday but came Sunday” guests, and your timed-entry data stops matching what happened on the floor. The fix people want is simple to describe: when a ticket is scanned for the wrong slot, move it to the slot the guest actually used, right there at the door. Getting there in Altru takes a little more thought.
Why the scan alone doesn’t fix the data
In Altru, a timed ticket belongs to a specific program and event (date and time). Scanning a ticket marks it as redeemed, but it doesn’t change which event the ticket was sold for. So when you admit someone off-schedule, Altru still counts them against the original slot. Your sales and capacity reports reflect what was purchased, not when people showed up.
That gap matters for a few reasons:
- Capacity: the slot the guest actually entered looks emptier than it is, so you may keep selling into it.
- Staffing and programming: if you plan docent tours or feeding demos around attendance by hour, the data is skewed toward booking times rather than arrival times.
- No-show analysis: a guest who came at the wrong time can look like a no-show for their original slot or be counted twice in rough estimates.
The native option: exchange before you scan
Altru does support changing the event on an existing order, which is the cleanest way to keep data accurate. Staff look up the order (by confirmation number, name, or the ticket barcode), exchange the tickets to the event the guest is actually attending, and then admit them. The ticket now belongs to the right slot, and your reports follow.
The catch is that this is a sales-side task, not a scanning-side task. It usually means stepping away from the entry line to a workstation with order access, and it depends on your security roles. Volunteers and seasonal gate staff often don’t have permission to modify orders, and you may not want them to. Exactly which steps and permissions your setup requires depends on your Altru configuration, so test the exchange flow in your sandbox or confirm with Blackbaud support before you train staff on it.
Practical setups that work
Since most scanning setups can’t reassign a ticket in the same motion as admitting it, organizations usually pick one of these approaches:
1. Route off-schedule guests to one person
The scanner (or staff member) catches the mismatch, and the guest is sent to a single desk position with permission to exchange orders. That person moves the ticket to the current slot and admits them. This keeps data clean and limits order-editing access to a few trained people. It does add a step during your heaviest entry periods, so it works best when off-schedule arrivals are occasional.
2. Admit now, reconcile later
Let gate staff admit the guest and log the original ticket and the actual entry time, either on a shared sheet or by holding the scanned tickets aside. Someone with order access does the exchanges at the end of the day. Accurate in the end, but only if the end-of-day step actually happens. Assign an owner.
3. Accept the gap and report around it
Some sites decide that a small number of off-schedule entries isn’t worth the labor. If you go this way, at least measure it: a query on redeemed tickets that compares scan time to event time shows how often guests arrive outside their window. If the number stays small, you have your answer. If it’s large, that’s an argument for options 1 or 2, or for adjusting your entry windows.
Set a grace window and write it down
Much of the rescheduling burden disappears once you decide what counts as “on time.” A common policy is to admit anyone within a set window after their slot (say, 30 or 60 minutes) without changing anything, and only exchange tickets for guests well outside it or on a different day. Put the rule in your confirmation emails and on the ticket page so guests know it, and give gate staff a one-line version they can repeat.
For different-day arrivals, also decide whether the exchange is free, and whether it depends on capacity in the slot they want. Staff shouldn’t have to make that call guest by guest.
Where Social Good fits
Our Ticket Scanner lets staff scan Altru tickets and membership barcodes at the door on mobile devices, which makes it easier to staff more entry points and spot off-schedule tickets as they come in. Moving a ticket to a different event is still an order change in Altru, so pair the scanner with one of the routing or reconciliation setups above.
Quick answers
Does scanning a ticket move it to the current time slot?
No. Scanning redeems the ticket; the event it was sold for stays the same unless someone exchanges the order.
Should gate volunteers be able to exchange orders?
Usually not. Most sites keep order changes with a few trained staff and send off-schedule guests to them, or reconcile after close.
