Say you partner with a local library to offer 25 free or half-price admissions a day, or you run a “first 50 visitors” promotion on Tuesdays. The discount is easy to build in Altru. Stopping it at 25 or 50 is the hard part.
This article covers what to expect from Altru’s discounts, a workaround that uses capacity to enforce the cap, and the reporting habits that keep a daily limit honest when the software won’t count for you.
Start with an honest look at Altru’s discounts
Altru discounts are built to answer “who qualifies, and how much off?” You can tie them to sales methods, items, and in some cases promotion codes, and staff can apply them at the point of sale. What they aren’t really built for is counting usage across a whole day and switching off after a set number of transactions.
We haven’t seen a reliable built-in setting for “stop after N uses per day,” and you shouldn’t assume one exists just because a field looks close. Some limits apply per order or per transaction, which is a different thing from a daily cap. Before you design around a gap, confirm it for your version:
- Build a test discount in a sandbox or test environment and see what limit options it gives you.
- Ask Blackbaud support directly whether discounts can be capped by count per day, and whether the answer differs between daily sales and online sales.
- Check the Altru community and release notes for recent changes to discounts and promotions.
If it turns out you can’t cap it natively, the options below have worked for other organizations.
Option 1: Let capacity do the counting
Altru does know how to stop selling when a scheduled event is full. You can use that to enforce a daily discount limit.
Rather than applying a discount to regular general admission, create a separate program or event for the discounted access, such as “Library Pass Admission” or “Community Day Admission.” Price it at the discounted rate and give each day’s event a capacity equal to your daily cap. When the 25th ticket sells, that day is sold out and staff can’t go past it without deliberately overriding capacity.
Things to work through before you commit:
- Scheduling. You need an event instance for every day the offer runs. For a year-round partner program, that means building the schedule well in advance and keeping it extended.
- Revenue reporting. Revenue from the discounted program will show up separately from general admission. That’s often useful, but tell your finance team so their attendance and revenue reports still add up.
- Overrides. Find out which security roles can sell past capacity, and limit that right to supervisors if the cap matters.
- Online visibility. If the program is available online, sold-out days show the limit to the public. Decide whether that’s acceptable or whether the offer should be desk-only.
This approach doesn’t let you cap a percentage discount applied across several item types. It works best when the discounted thing is one admission at one price.
Option 2: Control who can apply the discount
If the discount has to stay a discount (for example, it applies to a whole cart or to several price types), you can’t make Altru count it, but you can make it hard to overuse.
- Limit the sales methods. Make the discount available only at the desk, not online, so every use goes through a person who can see the tally.
- Restrict it by role. If your security setup allows it, give the right to apply the discount to supervisors or a small group of trained staff.
- Use a paper or shared tally for the day. It’s low-tech, but a clipboard or shared sheet at the register showing “14 of 25 used” works, especially across more than one register.
- Rotate codes for online promotions. If the offer has to run online and your setup uses promotion codes, a new code each day plus a habit of retiring it once the count is reached limits the damage from codes shared on social media. Someone has to own that task every day.
Option 3: Watch it with a query
Whichever approach you take, set up a way to see actual usage. Build a query or report of the day’s sales that shows transactions where the discount was applied, with the date, sales method, and user. Run it at midday and at close during the first few weeks.
That tells you whether the cap is being respected, which staff are applying the discount, and whether demand is close to the limit. If you never come near 25, you may not need strict enforcement. If you’re at 40 by noon, you need Option 1.
Choosing between them
- Hard limit, single admission type: separate program with capacity.
- Soft limit, a few uses over is acceptable: role restrictions plus a desk tally.
- Online promotion with a public code: daily code rotation plus a query you actually check.
- Partner agreement with reporting obligations: separate program, because clean reporting by program makes your monthly partner report much easier.
Quick answers
Can a discount automatically turn off after a certain number of uses?
Don’t count on it. Test in a sandbox and confirm with Blackbaud support before you promise a partner a hard limit enforced by software.
Will a capacity-based program affect general admission capacity?
Only if you set it up to share capacity. Check how your scheduling and capacity settings interact before launch, especially on days when general admission sells out.
