A wrong payment date rarely gets caught at the register. It shows up days later, when the deposit doesn’t match the drawer, a membership starts on the wrong day, or a gift lands in the previous fiscal month. By then the cashier who keyed it has gone home, and someone in finance is tracing a single transaction back through a report.
The fix people want is simple: every payment taken at the desk should be dated today unless someone deliberately changes it. How close you can get to that in Altru depends on where the payment is being entered, so it’s worth separating the cases before changing anything.
First, figure out which screen the bad dates come from
Altru records money in several places, and they don’t all behave the same way:
- Daily sales at the register, where tickets, memberships, and walk-up donations are rung up together.
- Payments added on a constituent record, such as paying off a pledge, an event registration balance, or a group sales order.
- Revenue batches, where staff key in checks or mailed gifts after the fact.
Transactions completed in daily sales are normally tied to the session and the day they happen, so date problems there are less common. Trouble tends to come from the other two, where a date field is presented to the user and can be blank, carry over a value, or be filled in by hand. Before you look for a setting, pull a sample of the wrongly dated payments and note which workflow each one came from. That tells you whether you’re dealing with a configuration question, a training question, or both.
Find out how often it actually happens
Build a revenue query that shows the payment date alongside the system date added, and filter for records where the two don’t match. Add the user who created the record and the payment method. A few minutes with that output usually shows a pattern: one workflow, one user, or one time of year (often right after a holiday or the start of a new month).
Keep the query. Running it weekly is the most reliable safety net you have, whatever else you change.
Options for getting today’s date in by default
Batch templates
If the misdated payments come through batches, check whether your batch template lets you set default values for fields, including the date. Many Blackbaud batch setups do support defaults, but confirm in your own Altru instance or in a sandbox before relying on it. A default only helps if someone updates it, so make “set the batch date” the first step of opening a new batch, not something left from last week.
Date field shortcuts
Some Blackbaud date fields accept a typed shortcut for the current date. Test it in your environment on a non-production record: click into the date field, try the shortcut, and see what it fills in. If it works, it’s the fastest habit to teach. If it doesn’t, don’t put it in your training notes.
Ask Blackbaud directly
If payments added on constituent records don’t default to the current date and there’s no setting you can find, open a case with Blackbaud support and ask two specific questions: is the default date on that form configurable, and is the current behavior intended? Bring an example transaction. A concrete screen and record gets a clearer answer than “dates are wrong.”
What to do while the default stays manual
If it turns out the field can’t be forced to today, the goal shifts to catching mistakes the same day instead of next month.
- Make the date part of the cashier’s checklist. One line at the register: “Check the date before you save a payment.” Seasonal staff respond better to a short, visible note than to a training session they had in May.
- Reconcile daily. Compare the day’s payments report against the drawer and card settlement before the session is closed. A payment dated yesterday or last month stands out when the totals don’t tie.
- Restrict who can change dates later. Review security roles so only finance or an admin can edit payment dates on posted revenue. That keeps corrections deliberate and documented.
- Watch the month boundary. The first few days of a new month and the first day after a closure are when stale dates are most likely. Run the mismatch query on those days specifically.
Correcting payments that are already wrong
Whether you can edit a payment date depends on whether the revenue has already been posted to your general ledger. Unposted revenue can usually be corrected on the record. Posted revenue should go through your finance team, since changing it may require an adjustment rather than a simple edit. Either way, add a note on the record explaining the change so the audit trail makes sense to whoever looks next.
Quick answers
Is there one global setting that forces every Altru payment date to today?
We’re not aware of a single switch that covers every payment screen. Behavior varies by workflow, so confirm with Blackbaud support for the specific form your staff use.
Why does the date matter if the amount is right?
Payment date drives which deposit, fiscal period, and report the money falls into, and for memberships it can affect start and expiration dates. A correct amount on the wrong day still breaks reconciliation.
