A family buys two adult tickets and a child ticket, the total comes to $41.83, and they hand over a fifty. Your cashier has a drawer with three pennies in it. With the U.S. Mint no longer producing new pennies, that moment is getting more common at admissions desks and gift shops, and Altru doesn’t change its math because your coin tray is empty.
As far as we know, Altru has no built-in “round cash to the nearest nickel” setting for daily sales. If you’re unsure whether your version or configuration offers one, test in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build a workaround. Assuming it doesn’t, the job comes down to three decisions: how to avoid odd-cent totals in the first place, what to do when they happen anyway, and how to make the drawer balance at the end of the shift.
Start with your prices, not your cashiers
The cleanest fix is a total that already ends in 0 or 5. Look at what actually sells for cash at your site:
- Admission with no sales tax. Many admissions aren’t taxed, depending on your state and how your organization is set up. If yours aren’t, keep every price type and add-on at a nickel or dollar amount and the problem mostly disappears for ticket sales.
- Taxed items. Gift shop merchandise, food, and sometimes parking are where odd cents come from. A $7.00 item plus tax rarely lands on a nickel, and combinations of items make it worse. You can’t fully price your way out of this, but you can reduce how often it happens.
- Tax-inclusive pricing. Some organizations prefer to price taxed items so the guest pays an even amount. Whether that’s allowed, and how it has to be presented, depends on your state’s rules. Talk with your finance office or tax advisor before changing how Altru calculates tax on merchandise.
Run a quick report or query on recent daily sales paid in cash. If most odd-cent totals come from one or two taxed items, that tells you where to focus.
Pick a rounding rule and stick to it
When a cash total ends in 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, or 9 cents, staff need one answer, not a judgment call. The two common approaches:
Round down, always
The guest never pays more than the receipt says. You absorb a few cents per cash sale. This is the simplest rule to explain and the hardest for anyone to complain about. For most cultural organizations, the yearly cost is small next to the time saved arguing over pennies.
Round to the nearest nickel
Totals ending in 1, 2, 6, or 7 cents go down; 3, 4, 8, or 9 go up. Over many transactions it roughly evens out. The catch is legal and reputational: rules about rounding cash totals up vary by state and city, and some places have specific requirements for businesses that accept cash. Check local guidance before you adopt it, and post the policy at the register if you do.
Whichever you choose, the rule applies to cash only. Card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay payments should always charge the exact amount.
How to record the difference in Altru
This is the part to settle with your finance team before you train anyone. There are two reasonable approaches, and they produce different audit trails.
- Leave the transaction exact and track it as drawer over/short. The sale records at $41.83, the guest pays $41.80, and the drawer comes up three cents short at reconciliation. Nothing about your Altru setup changes. The downside is that real cash discrepancies get mixed in with rounding, so a drawer that’s $1.40 short on a slow day is harder to explain.
- Use a dedicated rounding discount. If your Altru configuration lets you create a discount that staff can apply with a small variable amount, set one up called something like “Cash rounding” and map it to its own account. The transaction total then matches the cash collected, and you can query exactly how much rounding cost you each month. Confirm in a sandbox that the discount behaves as expected on mixed carts (tickets plus merchandise) and that it doesn’t distort your sales tax reporting, since a discount applied before tax changes the tax owed.
If you go with the discount, limit who can apply it and how much. A rounding discount should never be more than four cents. Note that a discount only handles rounding down; if you round to the nearest nickel, the round-ups still have to land somewhere, usually as drawer overages.
Train for the edge cases
- Split payments. When a guest pays part in cash and part by card, round only the cash portion, or simply put the odd cents on the card.
- Exact change. If a guest has the pennies and wants to pay exactly, take them. Rounding is a convenience, not a requirement.
- Refunds. Decide whether a cash refund returns the rounded amount or the receipt amount. Matching what the guest actually paid is usually the least confusing.
- Donation round-ups. Some sites invite cash guests to “keep the change” as a gift. If you do this, record it as a real donation in Altru so it shows up in revenue and acknowledgments correctly, rather than letting it disappear into drawer overages.
Reconcile with the rule in mind
Give whoever closes out drawers a simple expectation: under round-down with over/short tracking, small shortages are normal and overages are not. Under a rounding discount, the drawer should balance to the penny. Either way, review the numbers after the first month. If rounding is costing more than you expected, that usually points back to a taxed item worth repricing.
Quick answers
Do we have to stop accepting pennies?
No. Pennies remain legal tender. Rounding only matters when you can’t make change.
Should we stop taking cash entirely?
Some jurisdictions require businesses to accept cash, and many visitors rely on it. Check your local rules before going cashless, even for a single register.
