A donor calls two weeks after a year-end gift: they meant to give $250, not $2,500, and they want the difference back. Or a family foundation’s check bounces. Or a card gift turns into a chargeback. The money question is quick. Getting Altru to tell the truth afterward takes longer, because a refunded gift touches revenue, the general ledger, the donor’s giving history, and sometimes an acknowledgment or tax receipt that’s already in the mail.
Below is how to think about it, which questions decide the right approach, and the cleanup most people forget.
First, decide what actually happened
“Refund” gets used for several different situations, and they shouldn’t all be recorded the same way:
- A true refund. You received the money and are giving some or all of it back at the donor’s request.
- A failed payment. A bounced check or a declined or reversed card charge. You never really had the money.
- A chargeback. The donor’s bank pulled the funds back through a dispute. It’s a refund you didn’t agree to, and it may come with a processing fee.
- A data entry error. The gift was keyed to the wrong constituent, the wrong amount, or the wrong designation. Nothing was refunded. The record is just wrong.
- An unpaid pledge. The donor won’t fulfill a commitment. That’s a pledge write-off, not a refund.
Keep these apart. If every one of them gets handled by deleting the gift, you lose the audit trail, and your finance team ends up with deposits that don’t match revenue.
The question that matters most: has the revenue been posted?
In Altru, whether revenue has been posted to the general ledger decides almost everything.
Not yet posted
If the gift is still unposted (for example, it’s sitting in a batch or hasn’t gone out in a GL post yet), you generally have more freedom. Correcting the amount, or removing the revenue for a pure data entry error, is usually fine because finance hasn’t recorded it yet. Even so, add a note to the constituent record explaining what changed and why. Six months later, nobody will remember.
Already posted
Once revenue is posted, don’t delete or quietly overwrite it. Finance has already booked it, and editing or removing it makes Altru disagree with the ledger. Posted revenue should be adjusted so the change shows up as its own entry with its own date. That keeps the original gift, the reversal, and the timing all visible.
Exactly how adjustments to posted revenue behave in your database (which fields can change, what date the adjustment carries, how it flows into your next GL post) depends on your Altru setup and your posting configuration. If you’ve never done one, try it in a sandbox first or ask Blackbaud support to walk through it with you before you touch a real record. Bring your finance lead into that conversation too. They’ll have opinions about which period the reversal should land in, especially across a fiscal year-end.
Don’t forget the payment side
Altru records the gift. Your payment processor or bank moves the money. Issuing the refund through your processor does not necessarily update the Altru record, and changing the Altru record doesn’t send money back to anyone. Treat them as two separate steps and confirm both:
- Issue the refund through whatever processed the payment (merchant account, card terminal, or a check from accounts payable).
- Record the adjustment or correction in Altru.
- Make sure the dates and amounts on both sides agree, so the monthly reconciliation doesn’t turn up a surprise.
If you aren’t sure whether your card processing setup sends refunds back into Altru automatically, assume it doesn’t until you’ve tested it.
The cleanup people skip
Fixing the dollars is only half the job. A refunded gift can leave other things behind:
- Acknowledgments and tax receipts. If the donor already got a receipt for the full amount, send a corrected one, and keep a note of what was sent. Check your own policy and talk to your auditor about what the corrected letter should say.
- Memberships tied to the gift. If the payment covered a membership or a giving level that comes with benefits, decide whether the membership stays active. A refunded payment that leaves an active membership behind is a common loose end.
- Recognition. Donor walls, annual report lists, and giving-level smart fields may still count the original amount. Check anything built on lifetime or fiscal-year giving totals.
- Soft credits and tributes. If someone else got soft credit, or the gift honored a tribute, those may need correcting too.
- Appeal and campaign reporting. Someone may already have reported results based on the original amount. Tell the development team so their numbers stay honest.
Make it a written procedure
Refunds are rare enough that whoever handles one is usually doing it for the first time. A one-page procedure saves a lot of guesswork. Include who can approve a refund, who issues it through the processor, who records it in Altru, how posted versus unposted revenue is handled, and the cleanup checklist above.
It’s also worth building a simple query of revenue adjustments for the last quarter and reviewing it with finance now and then. It catches refunds that were processed on one side and never recorded on the other.
Quick answers
Can I just delete a refunded gift?
Only if it was never posted and was truly entered in error. For posted revenue, use an adjustment so the history and the ledger stay aligned.
Should a partial refund be handled differently?
The same posted-versus-unposted logic applies. You’re reducing the amount instead of reversing it entirely, and the donor’s receipt still needs to reflect what they actually gave.
What about a chargeback fee?
That’s an expense to your organization, not a change to the donor’s gift. Ask finance how they want it recorded. It usually doesn’t belong on the constituent record.
