A reprinted receipt is usually harmless. A guest lost theirs, a member wants proof of a donation for their taxes, the printer jammed halfway through. The trouble starts when a reprint looks exactly like the original and anyone at the register can produce as many as they like. Then a receipt becomes something that can be handed to a second person, waved at a refund desk, or used to cover a cash shortage at the end of a shift.
Altru gives you some tools to manage this, but it may not give you every control you want. This guide covers what to lock down, what to check in your own setup, and the procedures that close the remaining gaps.
Be clear about what you are actually trying to prevent
“Control reprints” can mean several different things, and each one has a different fix:
- Who can reprint. You want only supervisors, or only box office leads, to produce a copy.
- How many times. You want a hard cap, such as one reprint per transaction.
- Whether a copy is obvious. You want a reprint to say “duplicate” or “reprint” so nobody mistakes it for the original.
- Whether you can see it happened. You want a record of who reprinted what and when.
Write down which of these matters most to your organization before you start changing settings. A museum worried about admission fraud cares about different things than a finance office worried about duplicate donation acknowledgments.
Restrict who can reprint
This is the control you are most likely to have today. Altru uses security roles to decide which tasks each user can perform, and reprinting from sales history is a task like any other. Review the roles your front-line staff use and check whether the ability to reprint receipts or tickets is granted to everyone by default.
A few practical points:
- Test in a sandbox or with a test user first. Role permissions in Altru can be broad, and removing one task sometimes affects screens you did not expect.
- Seasonal and volunteer roles are often copies of a full cashier role. Those are the ones most worth tightening.
- Give supervisors a simple way to do the reprint for a guest so the restriction does not turn into a line at the desk.
The harder parts: counting and marking copies
We are not aware of a simple setting in Altru that caps reprints at a fixed number per transaction. Whether your receipt or ticket layout can automatically print “duplicate” on a second copy depends on your version and how your print layouts are configured. Do not assume either way. Run a test sale in your sandbox, reprint it twice, and compare the output side by side. If you cannot tell the copies apart, ask Blackbaud support whether a layout change or setting can mark them.
Likewise, check what your system actually records when someone reprints. Some actions in Altru leave an audit trail you can report on and some do not. If you can find reprint activity in a query or report, you have a monitoring tool. If you cannot, you need to rely on process instead.
Process controls that work regardless of settings
Where the software stops, a few habits fill in:
- Require a reason. Staff note the reason for any reprint on the transaction or in a simple shift log: lost receipt, printer error, guest request for donation record.
- Handwrite or stamp “copy.” If the printed receipt cannot be marked automatically, a stamp at the register does the job for paper.
- Reconcile against the batch. When daily sales are reconciled, the money should match transactions, not pieces of paper. A reprinted receipt cannot create revenue, so treat any cash shortage as a cash problem, not a receipt problem.
- Refunds go back to the transaction. Never refund from a receipt alone. Look up the original sale in Altru and confirm it has not already been refunded.
- Spot-check. Once a month, a manager reviews the shift logs for unusual reprint patterns by user or time of day.
Receipts versus tickets
Keep the two separate in your thinking. A reprinted receipt is a proof-of-purchase problem. A reprinted ticket is an admission problem, because a second copy of a ticket can let a second person in. If tickets are your real concern, the stronger control is at the entrance: tickets with barcodes that are scanned and marked as used, so a duplicate fails the second time it is presented. That protects you no matter how many copies exist.
Donation receipts are a third case. Donors legitimately ask for copies at tax time. For those, it is usually better to send a fresh acknowledgment from the constituent record than to reprint the original point-of-sale receipt, so the copy is clearly a record rather than a second original.
Quick answers
Can I stop cashiers from reprinting entirely?
Usually yes, by removing the relevant task from their security role. Test it first so you know which screens change.
Can Altru limit reprints to one copy?
We do not know of a built-in cap. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your version, and use role restrictions plus a reprint log in the meantime.
Is a reprinted receipt a financial risk on its own?
Not usually. The risk comes from refunds or admissions issued against paper instead of against the transaction record.
