Gift certificates look simple until the first one comes back. A guest hands over a printed certificate for $40, the cashier rings it through, and nobody can say for sure whether that same number was already used last month at your other entrance. The sale part is easy in Altru. The tracking part is where organizations get burned.
This guide covers two things front-desk teams need: selling certificates in amounts other than a few fixed price points, and keeping a reliable record of which certificate numbers are outstanding and which have been redeemed.
Start with an honest look at what Altru gives you
Altru handles the money side of a gift certificate well enough: you can sell an item, take payment, and attach the sale to a constituent. What many organizations find missing is a built-in, enforced ledger of individual certificate numbers, where a number is issued once, checked at redemption, and blocked from being used twice. How much of that your Altru setup can do depends on how your sales items, payment methods, and any custom fields are configured.
Before building workarounds, confirm what you actually have. Try a full sale and redemption in a sandbox or test environment, and ask Blackbaud support directly whether your configuration can capture and validate a unique number at both points. Don’t assume either way.
Selling certificates in custom amounts
There are two common setups, and each has trade-offs.
Fixed denominations
Create a separate sales item for each value you sell, such as $25, $50, $100. Cashiers can’t mistype a price, and your reports show exactly how many of each denomination went out. The downside is obvious: a guest who wants a $35 certificate either gets talked into $25 plus $10 in something else, or leaves.
One open-priced item
Set up a single gift certificate item where the price is entered at the time of sale, if your daily sales configuration allows price entry or override on that item. This covers any amount, but it moves the accuracy burden to the cashier. Limit who can sell it, and include the amount check in your end-of-shift reconciliation.
Many organizations combine the two: fixed denominations for the common amounts, plus one open-priced item that only leads and managers can ring.
Recording the certificate number
Whatever field you use, the number has to be captured at the moment of sale, not afterward. Options to test in your environment:
- A comment or reference field on the transaction, if one is available in your sales workflow. Quick for cashiers, but harder to query consistently unless everyone types the number in the same format.
- A note or attribute on the purchaser’s constituent record. Easier to search later, and it ties the certificate to a real person if there’s ever a dispute.
- A separate log outside Altru (covered below) when neither of the above gives you a reliable lookup.
Use pre-numbered certificate stock rather than writing numbers by hand. If you have more than one location, give each its own prefix (for example, “N-1042” and “S-1042”) so a number never collides across sites.
Redeeming without double-counting
Redemption is where the money and the record have to stay in sync. The usual approach is to set up a dedicated payment method for gift certificates, so a redemption shows up as a payment type rather than a discount or a comp. That keeps your daily sales totals honest and lets finance see exactly how much certificate value was used.
The cashier then needs to do three things, in this order:
- Look up the number before accepting it. Check it against whatever ledger you use. If it shows as redeemed, stop and call a lead.
- Ring the sale using the gift certificate payment method and enter the certificate number in the reference or comment field.
- Mark the number redeemed immediately, not at the end of the day. Double use across two locations typically happens in the gap between redemption and logging.
Keep the physical certificate. Staple it to the receipt copy or drop it in a locked envelope for the day’s deposit, so there’s a paper trail for audits.
Partial balances
Decide this before it comes up at the counter. Either certificates are single-use (any unused value is forfeited, if that’s legal where you operate) or you issue a new certificate with a new number for the remaining balance and void the original. Tracking running balances on one number is error-prone without software built for it.
A shared ledger for multi-site organizations
When Altru can’t enforce uniqueness for you, a single shared ledger fills the gap. A shared spreadsheet with one row per certificate works: number, amount, sale date, purchaser, sold at, redeemed date, redeemed at, and cashier initials. The rules that make it work:
- One ledger for every location, never a copy per site.
- Edit access only for staff who sell or redeem.
- Lookup happens live at the counter, on a device at each register.
Reconciling with finance
Gift certificate sales are usually a liability until redeemed, not earned revenue. Talk to your finance team about which GL account the sales item should post to, and how redemptions move that value into revenue. Then run a monthly check:
- Total sold (from an Altru query or report on the gift certificate items)
- Total redeemed (from the gift certificate payment method)
- Outstanding balance, which should match the unredeemed rows in your ledger
When those three numbers disagree, you’ll usually find a sale with no number recorded or a redemption that never got marked. Catching that monthly is far easier than untangling a year of it.
Expiration rules for gift certificates vary by state, so confirm with your finance or legal team before printing an expiration date on anything.
