A school district books eleven field trips between September and December. The district’s accounts payable office doesn’t want eleven invoices. It wants one statement on the first of each month listing every visit, what was owed, and what’s still open. That’s a reasonable ask, and it’s one Altru doesn’t answer neatly out of the box.
Group sales in Altru is built around the individual reservation: one group, one visit date, one order with its own deposit, balance, and payments. That works well for a one-off bus tour. It gets awkward when the same customer books over and over and wants to pay on a monthly cycle. Below is how experienced administrators handle it with the tools Altru already has, and where the gaps are.
Know what you’re working with
Before designing a process, confirm three things in your own database:
- How your repeat customers are set up. Ideally each district, tour operator, or camp is a single organization constituent, with the individual teachers or trip leaders linked as relationships. If the same district exists as four slightly different records, any monthly roll-up will be wrong before you start.
- Whether reservations carry an outstanding balance you can report on. Group sales orders track what’s been paid against what’s due. Build a quick query of group sales reservations and check that the balance field you plan to use matches what you see on the reservation itself.
- Whether your version offers any consolidated statement or invoice output. Altru’s group sales tools print confirmations and invoices per reservation. We aren’t aware of a native “one statement for all of this customer’s reservations this month” option, but configurations differ. Test in your sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build a workaround for something you might already have.
A monthly invoicing routine that holds up
1. Keep one reservation per visit
It’s tempting to lump a month of visits into one big reservation so there’s one bill. Resist that. Separate reservations keep attendance, capacity, and revenue tied to the right date, and they make refunds or cancellations for a single trip far simpler. The consolidation belongs on the statement, not in the data.
2. Build a statement query
Create a group sales query that returns, for a given organization and date range:
- Reservation name or number and visit date
- Group contact or trip leader
- Total amount, amount paid, and balance due
- Any PO number or reference the customer gave you (store it consistently, in the same field every time, or this column will be useless)
Filter on the organization constituent and on visit dates within the billing month. Save it so the only thing staff change each month is the date range. If you bill several repeat customers this way, a second version filtered to “balance greater than zero” gives you a quick open-receivables list across all of them.
3. Turn the query into a statement
Export the results and merge them into a statement template in Word or your spreadsheet tool. Keep the template simple: your organization’s details, the customer’s billing contact, a line per visit, a total due, a due date, and clear payment instructions. Number each statement and save a copy, because the customer’s AP office will reference it when they pay.
4. Apply payments to the right reservations
This is where monthly billing usually goes sideways. A district sends one check covering six visits. In Altru, that money still needs to land on each of the six reservations, not just sit on one. Decide in advance how you’ll split partial payments (oldest visit first is the common rule), and have the person posting payments work from the numbered statement so they know exactly which reservations the check covers.
5. Reconcile before the next cycle
Before running next month’s statements, re-run the open-balance query. Anything still showing a balance from a prior month should appear on the new statement as a past-due line. If balances look wrong, it’s almost always a payment applied to the wrong reservation, so fix it at the reservation level rather than adjusting the statement by hand.
Policies worth settling first
- Who qualifies for monthly billing. Most organizations limit it to schools, districts, and established tour operators. Everyone else pays a deposit and settles before or on the visit date.
- Payment terms. Net 30 from the statement date is common. Write it on the statement.
- Deposits. Will repeat customers on monthly terms still owe deposits? If you waive them, your capacity planning depends on their cancellation habits, so track no-shows.
- Who owns the process. One person running statements on a set day each month beats three people doing it when they remember.
Making payment easier on the customer’s side
Mailed statements still get paid by check more often than not, and checks are the slowest part of this cycle. Link2Pay from Social Good lets you send a branded pay-by-link for a group sales balance or invoice, and the payment posts to Altru. Adding that link to each monthly statement gives a customer’s billing contact a card option without anyone on your team taking card numbers over the phone.
Quick answers
Can Altru email the monthly statement automatically?
Not as a built-in group sales feature that we know of. Most teams export the query and send statements themselves. Confirm with Blackbaud support if your setup differs.
Should I bill the organization or the trip leader?
Bill the organization constituent and address the statement to its billing contact. Teachers and trip leaders change every year; the district’s AP office usually doesn’t.
