“The card didn’t go through” can describe four or five very different failures. The card might have been declined by the bank. The payment screen might have hung before it ever reached the processor. The charge might have succeeded while Altru never saved the sale. Or the sale saved and the cashier didn’t realize it. Each one has a different fix, and the first job is figuring out which one you have.
Altru takes cards through Blackbaud Merchant Services (BBMS), Blackbaud’s payment processing service. That means there are at least three parties in every card transaction: Altru, BBMS, and the card network or issuing bank. A failure at any of them looks the same to the person standing at the counter.
Start by sorting the failure
Before anyone calls support, answer these questions for one specific failed transaction:
- Was there a decline message, or did nothing happen? A clear decline usually means the bank or processor said no. A spinning screen, a blank payment window, or a timeout points to a connection, browser, or device problem.
- Was the customer actually charged? Ask them to check their banking app for a pending charge, and look in your BBMS account for the transaction. A charge with no matching Altru sale is the most important case to catch, because it can lead to a double charge if staff simply run the card again.
- Where did it happen? Daily sales at the desk, advance or group sales, a membership or donation entered by staff, or an online web form. The causes differ by channel.
- Is it one card, one workstation, or everything? One card failing is almost always the card. One computer failing is usually the browser or device. Everything failing at once is usually an outage or an account-level issue.
Write the answers down with the date, time, amount, and the last four digits of the card. That’s what Blackbaud support will ask for, and it saves a round of back-and-forth.
Clear declines
When the processor returns a decline, Altru is doing its job. Common reasons include insufficient funds, an expired card, a mismatched billing ZIP code or security code, or the issuing bank flagging the purchase as unusual. The fix is on the customer’s side: try another card, or have them call their bank.
Watch for a pattern, though. If many declines cite address or security-code mismatches, your BBMS fraud and verification settings may be stricter than you need for, say, a $20 admission ticket. Those settings live in your merchant account, not in Altru itself. Review them with Blackbaud before loosening anything, since they also protect you from chargebacks and card-testing attacks on your web forms.
Nothing happens at the desk
When the payment step hangs or errors out at a staffed register, check the boring things first:
- The browser. Altru runs in the browser, so clear the cache, close extra tabs, and try a different supported browser on the same machine. Browser updates occasionally break things that worked yesterday.
- Pop-up and extension blocking. Ad blockers, privacy extensions, and strict pop-up settings can interfere with the payment step. Test in a clean browser profile with no extensions.
- The card reader. If swipes or taps fail but keyed entry works, the problem is the device or its connection, not the account. Reconnect it, restart the workstation, and confirm the device is still supported and set up the way Blackbaud’s documentation describes.
- The network. Guest Wi-Fi, a firewall change by IT, or a content filter can block the connection to the payment service. If the failures started right after a network change, start there.
- Session time. Long idle periods on a sales screen can expire the session. Have staff refresh and log back in before a rush rather than in the middle of one.
Online payments that don’t finish
On web forms, you usually only hear about failures when a visitor emails or calls. Ask what device and browser they used and what they saw. Privacy-focused browsers, strict cookie settings, and in-app browsers (a link opened from inside a social media app, for example) are frequent culprits with embedded payment forms. Having them retry in a regular browser often works.
Also check that the form itself is still healthy: that it’s live, that the items and prices on it are still active in Altru, and that nothing about its payment configuration was changed. If one form fails and others work, compare the two.
Charged, but no sale in Altru
This is the case to treat carefully. If BBMS shows a successful charge but there’s no matching transaction in Altru, do not run the card again until you know what happened. Contact Blackbaud support with the transaction details, and decide with them whether to refund the charge or record the sale. Keep a simple log of these, since a recurring pattern is the kind of evidence that gets a problem escalated.
The reverse also happens: a sale exists in Altru but staff thought it failed and charged again. A quick end-of-day reconciliation of BBMS deposits against Altru revenue and batches catches both directions before customers notice.
When everything fails at once
If every workstation and every web form stops taking cards at the same moment, check the Blackbaud status page and your BBMS account status before troubleshooting locally. Account issues such as an expired credential, a merchant account under review, or a changed bank account can stop processing entirely. Only Blackbaud can confirm those, so call support early rather than spending an hour restarting computers.
It’s also worth having a written fallback for outages: whether you’ll admit guests and collect payment later, take cash only, or pause sales. Deciding that during an outage is harder than deciding it now.
Quick answers
Is it safe to just run the card again?
Only after you’ve confirmed the first attempt didn’t charge. Check BBMS or ask the customer to look for a pending charge first.
Who fixes processor-side problems, us or Blackbaud?
Merchant account settings, outages, and charges missing from Altru all go to Blackbaud support. Browsers, devices, and networks are usually yours to fix locally.
