Your Saturday garden crew is the same eight people, on the same job, for the same three hours, every week. Entering their hours in Altru one timesheet at a time feels like it should have a shortcut: open last week’s entry, copy it, change the date, save. That shortcut is what most volunteer coordinators go looking for.
The honest answer is that we don’t know of a “copy this timesheet” action on a volunteer’s timesheet in Altru. Timesheets are generally entered one at a time on the volunteer record, or in bulk through other routes. Your version and security role may change what you see, so if you haven’t checked recently, open a volunteer record in a test environment and look at the timesheet actions before you rely on anything below. Blackbaud support can confirm what’s available to your organization.
What you can do is stop retyping the same values. The options below are listed from least setup to most.
Option 1: Make single entry faster
When the volume is small (a handful of regulars), the quickest win is reducing what has to be typed for each entry.
- Keep job names short and distinct. If the job list has “Garden – Weekend,” “Garden Weekend Crew,” and “Gardens (Sat),” entry slows down and reports split hours across three jobs. Consolidate before anything else.
- Use the volunteer’s assigned job. If regulars are assigned to a job and schedule on their record, the person entering hours has less to look up each week.
- Enter from a paper or shared sign-in sheet in one sitting. Batching the work in time, even if each entry is separate, cuts the errors that come from entering hours piecemeal all week.
Option 2: Enter hours in a batch
Altru uses batches for entering many similar records at once, and some organizations have a batch type available for volunteer time. Check the batch types you can create. If one exists for timesheets, it’s usually the best substitute for copying: you can enter a row per volunteer, and many batch grids let you carry a value down from the row above, so the job, date, and hours only have to be typed once.
If you don’t see a timesheet batch type, it may not be enabled for your role, or it may not be offered in your setup. Ask your Altru administrator before assuming it’s missing.
Option 3: Import from a spreadsheet
For larger groups, the real equivalent of “duplicate” is a spreadsheet. Keep a template with one row per regular volunteer and the columns your import expects (typically the volunteer’s lookup ID or name, the job, the date, and the hours). Each week, change the date column, delete anyone who didn’t show, adjust hours, and import.
A few things make this work reliably:
- Use lookup IDs, not names. Names match the wrong constituent more often than you’d expect, especially with households and common surnames.
- Test with two rows first. Import a tiny file, then open those two volunteer records and confirm the timesheets landed on the right job with the right date and hours.
- Save each week’s file. If something imports wrong, you’ll want the exact file to compare against.
Whether import is available for timesheets, and which fields it accepts, depends on your Altru configuration. Confirm in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support before building a weekly process around it.
Option 4: Record the time where it already happens
Some teams sidestep the problem by changing where hours are counted. If the regulars sign in on a shared sheet, a tablet form, or a spreadsheet the crew lead maintains, that becomes the source for your weekly batch or import. The point is to type each week’s hours exactly once, in a format that can go straight into Altru.
Watch out for accidental duplicates
Once you start entering hours in bulk, the more common problem flips: the same shift gets recorded twice. A crew lead enters it, then the coordinator imports the sign-in sheet, and that volunteer now shows six hours for a three-hour shift. Volunteer hour totals often feed grant reports and recognition, so double counting matters.
Two habits catch most of it:
- One owner per crew. Decide who enters hours for each group and write it down. Overlap is where duplicates come from.
- A monthly check query. Build a volunteer timesheet query that shows volunteer, job, date, and hours, sorted by volunteer and date. Scan for two entries with the same volunteer, job, and date. If your query tool can group and count, filter to counts greater than one.
When you find a duplicate, delete the extra entry rather than editing hours down, so the record matches what actually happened.
Quick answers
Is there a way to make a timesheet repeat automatically each week?
We’re not aware of recurring timesheets in Altru. Schedules describe when someone is expected to volunteer, but hours worked are generally recorded separately. Confirm with Blackbaud support if this matters to your process.
Should we enter estimated hours for regulars and fix them later?
We’d avoid it. Pre-entered hours tend to stay uncorrected, and your reported totals drift away from reality. Enter hours after the shift, from a sign-in record.
