Gift shop inventory tends to drift without anyone noticing. A box of plush toys gets sold before anyone receives it in Altru. A cracked mug goes in the trash but stays in the count. By the year-end count, the on-hand numbers and the shelves don’t match, and nobody can say exactly when they stopped matching.
Altru can track merchandise alongside admissions and memberships, but it only knows what staff tell it. Accurate inventory comes from a routine more than from settings. This guide covers the routine, from setting up items through the annual count, plus a straight answer on when Altru is enough and when it isn’t.
Start with clean item setup
Most inventory problems trace back to how items were created. Before you worry about counts, look at your merchandise item list with these questions in mind:
- One item per thing you actually count. If the same t-shirt comes in four sizes, decide whether each size is its own item. If you only ever count “t-shirts,” separate size items create work without adding accuracy. If you reorder by size, you need them split.
- Barcodes on everything that gets scanned. Items rung up by searching a name are the ones that get rung up as the wrong item. Use vendor UPCs where they exist and print your own labels where they don’t.
- Consistent departments and categories. These drive your sales reports and, often, how revenue maps to the general ledger. Agree on the list with finance before adding new ones.
- Accurate cost, not just price. Without a cost on each item, you can report sales but not margin or the value of what’s on the shelf.
It’s also worth retiring items you no longer stock. A long list of dead items slows down searches at the register and makes counts harder to read.
The day-to-day flow
Receiving
Enter stock into Altru when it arrives, before it goes on the shelf. If you use purchase orders, receive against the order so quantities and costs carry through. If you don’t, record the received quantity directly on the item. Either way, the rule is the same: nothing gets put out until it’s in the system. Keep the packing slip with your receiving batch so you can check it later.
Selling
Sales rung through Altru’s daily sales reduce on-hand quantities automatically. The weak point is anything sold outside that path: a pop-up table at an event, a holiday sale run on a different device, or items given away as staff or donor gifts. Each of those needs to be entered in Altru as a sale or an adjustment, or the count will be wrong.
Adjustments
Damage, theft, samples, items moved to another location, and items pulled for an auction all need a recorded adjustment. Pick a short list of reasons and use the same ones every time. “Damaged” and “Broken” as two separate reasons makes your shrink reporting meaningless.
Restrict who can make adjustments. One or two people with that permission is plenty for most shops. When everyone can adjust stock, adjustments start covering for mistakes nobody investigated.
Counting
An annual full count is the minimum most auditors expect. On its own, it lets errors pile up for a year. A better pattern:
- Cycle counts monthly or quarterly. Count a slice of the shop each time: your top sellers, one department, or the highest-value items. Compare to Altru and research anything off by more than a unit or two.
- A full physical count once a year, usually at fiscal year end. Freeze sales or count after close, count each item twice with two different people, and enter the counted quantities.
- Write down why variances happened. Was it an unreceived shipment, a mis-rung item, a giveaway nobody entered? The cause tells you which part of the routine to fix.
Altru’s exact tools for entering counts and posting variances depend on your configuration and which features your organization has turned on. If you’re not sure how counted quantities post, or how they affect revenue and cost reporting, test the process in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before your first real count. Don’t find out on December 31.
Reports to keep an eye on
- On-hand by item and department. This is your reorder list and your shelf-value snapshot.
- Sales by item for the period. Slow movers show up here long before they show up as a markdown problem.
- Adjustments by reason and user. This is your best early warning for shrink.
- Items with zero or negative on-hand that still sold. This almost always means a receiving step was skipped.
If the standard reports don’t slice the way you need, a merchandise query you can rerun each month is usually enough. Save it, give it a clear name, and share it with whoever owns the shop.
When Altru is the right tool, and when it isn’t
For a small to mid-sized museum or garden shop where merchandise is a side line to admissions, keeping inventory in Altru makes sense. Sales, members’ discounts, and revenue all live in one place, and the routine above keeps the numbers honest.
It gets harder with a large retail operation: thousands of SKUs, multiple stores, item variants, online sales, or a buyer who needs open-to-buy planning and vendor reorder automation. Altru isn’t a dedicated retail inventory system. Some organizations in that position run a separate retail POS and bring summarized sales into Altru or the general ledger. That adds a reconciliation step and splits the guest’s history across two systems, so make the move only after the routine above has stopped being enough. Messy data in the new system won’t fix itself either.
Quick answers
Do sales made in Altru reduce inventory automatically?
Merchandise sold through Altru’s sales process reduces on-hand quantities for that item. Sales made anywhere else have to be entered separately.
How often should we count?
At least once a year in full, plus smaller cycle counts during the year. High-value and high-theft items deserve monthly checks.
Our counts are way off. Where do we start?
Look at receiving first. Unreceived shipments and items sold before they were entered are common, easy-to-fix causes, so rule them out before assuming theft.
