A school bus pulls up at 9:40. The front desk checks the daily schedule report, and the group isn’t on it. Somebody digs through group sales on a back-office computer, finds the reservation, and the morning goes on. It isn’t a disaster, but it happens again the next week, and the week after.
Usually there’s nothing wrong with the booking. The daily schedule report and group sales just work from different data, and groups booked without a program fall into the gap between them.
Why the report skips these groups
The daily schedule report is built around scheduled program events. It lists the events happening on a date, with times, capacity and what’s been sold against them, including group sales that are booked into those events. A group reserved for a 10:00 guided tour shows up because the tour is an event on the schedule.
Many groups don’t book a program, though. A self-guided school visit, a camp that buys general admission, or a tour operator dropping off a coach for a few hours may be entered as a group sale with an arrival date and time, a head count and pricing, but no scheduled event attached. The report has no event to hang that group on, so it leaves the group out. Altru isn’t losing the reservation. The report just isn’t designed to read reservations that way.
Report behavior can vary with your Altru configuration and how your group sales are set up, so test this in your environment before changing anything. Book a test group without a program for tomorrow, run the report, and see whether it appears. If you aren’t sure whether a setting or parameter would include these groups, ask Blackbaud support directly. That’s quicker than guessing.
Three ways to close the gap
None of these is perfect, and the best one depends on how many program-less groups you handle and who needs to see them.
1. Build a group arrivals query
This is the cleanest fix and doesn’t change how anything is booked. Create a query on group sales (reservations) filtered to a single arrival date, and output the fields the desk actually uses:
- Group or organization name and the primary contact’s phone number
- Arrival time and, if you track it, departure time
- Expected attendance or total tickets
- Reservation status, so canceled groups don’t show up as arriving
- Balance due, so staff know whether to collect payment at check-in
- Whether a program is attached, so you can tell the two kinds of group apart
Sort by arrival time. Leave the date filter as a prompt or relative date (“today” or “tomorrow”) so nobody has to edit the query every morning. Then print it alongside the daily schedule report, or have whoever opens the building run both. Two pages beats one page that’s missing groups.
2. Attach a placeholder program
Some organizations set up a simple program such as “Self-Guided Group Visit,” schedule events for it at your usual arrival windows, and require every group to be booked into one. The group then appears on the daily schedule report like any other.
The tradeoffs are real. You have to maintain the events, give them sensible capacities, and decide whether the program carries a price or stays at zero with admission priced separately. It can also muddy reporting if program revenue and attendance feed your board numbers. If you go this way, try it in a sandbox first and check what it does to your revenue and attendance reports before rolling it out.
3. Make it a booking rule
Whichever option you choose, the gap often widens because different staff book groups differently. One person attaches a program and another doesn’t. Write down when a group needs a program, what goes in the arrival time field, and where special notes such as accessibility needs or lunch space belong. When data is consistent, the query and the report can actually be relied on.
Spot-check before you trust it
For the first couple of weeks, compare the morning printouts with who actually showed up. If a group arrives and isn’t on either list, look at how it was booked. It’s usually a missing arrival date, a status that wasn’t updated, or a reservation entered as something other than a group sale. Each miss tells you which filter or booking habit to tighten.
Quick answers
Can I add program-less group sales to the daily schedule report itself?
Not that we can confirm as a standard option. The report is built around scheduled events. Check with Blackbaud support whether your version offers a parameter for it. Otherwise, a companion query is the dependable route.
Will the placeholder program affect capacity?
It can, if you give its events a capacity. Some teams do that on purpose to keep too many self-guided groups from booking into the same time slot. Others set a high capacity so it never blocks a booking.
