A group coordinator books a fourth-grade field trip for 60 students and 8 chaperones. When they open the price type list on the reservation, they get every price type the organization has ever made: adult, child, senior, member adult, member child, military, reciprocal, comp, the 2019 holiday promo, two school rates, and a homeschool rate somebody added last spring. The coordinator scrolls, picks “Child” instead of “School Student,” and the invoice is wrong before it goes out.
This is a common frustration in Altru group sales. Here is what controls that list, what you can tighten today, and how to catch the mistakes that still get through.
What decides which price types show up
Price types in Altru are defined once and shared across daily sales, advance sales, group sales, and online sales. The prices themselves are attached to each program or event, so the price types that appear for a given item generally follow what has been priced on that program.
Where teams get stuck is that there’s no obvious per-channel switch that says “show these price types in group sales only.” If a program is priced for walk-up adults and for school groups, both prices tend to show up wherever that program is sold. We aren’t aware of a native setting that filters the group reservation list by group type or sales channel. Because configuration options change between releases, confirm it with Blackbaud support or test in your sandbox before you redesign anything around that assumption.
Ways to shorten the list now
1. Retire price types you no longer use
Old promos and one-off rates are usually the biggest source of clutter. Run a query or report on recent sales by price type and look for ones with no activity in the last year or two. Before you inactivate anything, check that it isn’t still priced on an active program, a membership benefit, or a web form. Inactivating affects every channel, not just group sales, so keep a list of what you changed.
2. Price only what each program actually sells to groups
If a program is only ever booked by schools, such as a guided education program, price it with just the group rates. Leave the general admission price types off. That one choice often does more than anything else to fix the list on the reservations where mistakes cost the most.
For general admission, which both walk-ups and groups buy, this doesn’t work as well. Some organizations set up a separate “group admission” program or event that carries only group price types, and book groups against that program instead. It works, but it splits your attendance and revenue reporting across two items. Decide whether your finance and attendance reports can live with that before you commit.
3. Use a naming convention that sorts and reads clearly
If you can’t hide a price type, make it easy to spot. A consistent prefix such as “Group – Student,” “Group – Chaperone,” and “Group – Adult” groups them together and makes the right choice obvious to someone scrolling quickly. Check how your price type sort order is set up so the group rates sit together instead of being scattered alphabetically among everything else.
4. Write a one-page rate card for coordinators
List each group type you book (school, camp, senior center, corporate, scouts) and the exact price types allowed for each. Tape it next to the coordinator’s monitor and add it to your group sales training. It isn’t elegant, but a clear reference fixes more errors than a cleaner dropdown will.
Catch the mistakes that slip through
Even with a shorter list, someone will eventually pick a walk-up rate on a school reservation. Build a simple audit query on group sales reservations that returns any reservation using a price type outside your approved group set. Sort it by event date and run it weekly, ahead of confirmation letters and invoices. Fixing a price type before the invoice goes out is a two-minute edit. Fixing it after the school has paid means a refund conversation.
Two other checks are worth adding to that review:
- Member price types on group reservations. These usually mean someone applied a member discount the group isn’t entitled to.
- Comp quantities above your chaperone ratio. If your policy is one free chaperone per ten students, flag reservations that exceed it.
When it’s worth asking Blackbaud
If you’ve retired the dead price types, cleaned up program pricing, and still see errors every week, it’s worth opening a case with Blackbaud support. Describe the specific programs and group types involved and ask whether there’s a configuration you’ve missed. Bring a few real examples of wrong selections. A concrete case gets a more useful answer than a general complaint about the list being too long.
Quick answers
Will inactivating a price type break old reservations?
It shouldn’t change the history on completed transactions, but test it in your sandbox first, especially if the price type is tied to anything still active, such as a future reservation or a web form.
Can I make a price type visible only to group sales staff?
We don’t know of a native way to do this by user role. Ask Blackbaud support to confirm what your version supports before you build a process around it.
Is a separate group admission program worth the reporting tradeoff?
For organizations with heavy school traffic and frequent pricing errors, often yes. If group visits are a small share of attendance, a naming convention plus a weekly audit is usually enough.
