Someone in finance asks a simple question: how much did the second register in the gift shop take in last Saturday, compared with the ticket window by the main entrance? You open a sales order query in Altru, start looking for a workstation field, and find that it’s either buried, named something you didn’t expect, or not there at all.
This is a common snag. Workstations matter a lot in Altru’s day-to-day setup (they tie a physical computer to printers, cash drawers, and daily sales behavior), but that doesn’t guarantee the workstation travels along with the sales order into the query data you can report on. Below is how to check what your database actually exposes, and what to do if the field isn’t available.
Step one: search the query field list before assuming anything
Altru’s ad-hoc query fields are organized as a tree, and the label you want may not be the word “workstation.” Before deciding it’s missing, spend ten minutes on these checks:
- Use the field search in the query designer and try several terms: workstation, station, terminal, computer, location, and drawer.
- Expand related nodes, not just the top-level sales order fields. Payment, revenue, batch, and deposit-related nodes sometimes carry context about where and how a transaction was processed.
- Try a different query source. A sales order query and a revenue query look at overlapping data from different angles. A field that’s absent from one can appear in the other.
- Check custom fields. If someone at your organization added a custom attribute to capture location or register, it may show up under an attribute node.
If you find a workstation field, add it to output, filter to a single day you know well, and compare the totals against what staff counted at each register. Don’t trust a new field in finance reporting until you’ve reconciled it once by hand.
If the field isn’t there
We aren’t certain that every Altru database exposes workstation on sales orders in ad-hoc query, and it may depend on your version and configuration. The quickest way to get a definitive answer is to open a case with Blackbaud support and ask specifically whether the workstation used for a sales order is stored with the transaction and whether it’s queryable. If you have a sandbox, process a test sale on two different workstations and look for any field that differs between the two records.
While you wait, or if the answer is no, these workarounds get most organizations close enough.
Use the staff user as a proxy
Sales orders generally record which user created them. If each register is staffed by a consistent person or a dedicated login per shift, the “added by” user can stand in for the station. This falls apart when staff float between registers, so it works best for fixed posts like a gift shop or a membership desk.
Split by sales channel or batch
Daily sales, advance sales, group sales, and web sales are already distinguishable in most queries. If your real question is “front desk versus online versus groups,” you may not need workstation at all. Some organizations also batch or deposit by location, which gives a location breakdown through the batch or deposit instead of the transaction.
Lean on drawer reconciliation
If the goal is cash accountability rather than analysis, the end-of-day drawer and reconciliation process is usually where per-station totals already live. Check whether your existing daily sales reports answer the question before building something new.
Give each location something to track
A lighter-weight option is a custom attribute or a consistent code on the order that identifies the location. This only works going forward and depends on staff applying it reliably, so keep the list short and make it a required step at the stations that matter.
Making the report usable once you have the data
Whatever field you end up using, a few habits keep the report trustworthy:
- Save the query with a clear name that says what the station field really is (“Sales orders by created-by user” is more honest than “Sales by workstation” if you’re using a proxy).
- Include the sales order date and amount plus the payment method, so finance can tie it to drawer counts.
- Exclude voided and refunded orders deliberately, or include them in a separate column, so totals don’t drift from what was actually collected.
- Document the gaps. If staff moved between registers on a given day, note it. A per-station report that’s quietly wrong is worse than none.
Getting the numbers to the people who ask
Once the query returns the right rows, the next headache is usually distribution: someone exports it every Monday and emails a spreadsheet. Data Bridge from Social Good can sync an Altru query to Google Sheets on a schedule, so finance or operations can build their own per-station pivot without asking for a fresh export. It syncs what the query returns, so it won’t add a workstation field that Altru doesn’t expose, but it does take the manual export step off your plate once the query is right.
Quick answers
Is workstation the same as the user who rang the sale?
No. Workstation describes the computer and its hardware setup; the user is the person logged in. They line up only when one person stays at one register.
Can I add workstation to old sales orders after the fact?
Not reliably. If the information wasn’t captured on the transaction, any backfill would be a guess. Start capturing it going forward and treat older data as unavailable.
