A new shipment of plush animals, enamel pins, and exhibit catalogs arrives at the gift shop the week before a big opening. Every piece needs a price tag the register can scan, and the tags have to fit on a keychain as well as a coffee-table book. Getting there with Altru comes down to one distinction: Altru stores the barcode value, and a label printer prints it. Once you treat those as two separate jobs, the setup gets a lot simpler.
Start with the barcode value in Altru
A scanner at the register doesn’t “read a product.” It reads a string of characters and types it into the point-of-sale screen, exactly as if a cashier had keyed it in. For the sale to ring up correctly, that string has to match the code Altru looks up when you sell the item. Confirm which field on the merchandise item your daily sales screen actually searches (a barcode or lookup field, for example) by scanning a known item in a sandbox or asking Blackbaud support.
So before you think about printers, clean up the item data:
- Use the manufacturer’s UPC when the product has one. Books, packaged snacks, and most wholesale goods already carry a printed UPC. Enter that number on the item and you may not need to print a label at all, just a price sticker if you want one.
- Assign your own codes to everything else. House-made items, consignment pieces, and anything without a vendor barcode need an internal code. Pick a simple, consistent pattern (for example, a department prefix plus a sequence number) and stick to it.
- Give each size or color its own code if you track inventory at that level. A shirt in three sizes needs three different barcodes, or your counts will drift.
- Avoid characters that cause trouble. Letters, numbers, and dashes are safe. Spaces, slashes, and leading zeros that a spreadsheet might silently drop are the usual culprits when a label scans but the item isn’t found.
Check what your Altru version can print natively
Altru’s merchandise area handles items, pricing, and inventory, and depending on your version and configuration there may be a built-in way to output item labels. Built-in label output, where it exists, tends to be designed around standard sheet labels rather than small thermal tags, which is why many shops end up looking elsewhere for smaller sizes.
We’d rather not guess at the exact options in your environment. Look through the merchandise and reports areas, check Blackbaud’s current documentation, or ask Blackbaud support whether label printing is available and what label formats it supports. Test any output in a sandbox before ordering a case of label stock.
The approach that works in almost any setup: query, export, print
Even without a native label tool, you can produce good labels from Altru data with off-the-shelf label software.
- Build a query on your merchandise items (if you don’t see a merchandise source in your query options, ask Blackbaud support which one to use) that returns the fields you want on the tag: item name (or a short display name), barcode or item number, price, and optionally size or color. Add a filter for the items you’re labeling, such as a vendor, a category, or items added since a certain date.
- Export to CSV or Excel. Check the barcode column after export. If a spreadsheet turned a code into scientific notation or stripped a leading zero, format that column as text and re-export.
- Open the file in label design software. Most thermal printer makers ship their own designer, and third-party label programs can connect to a spreadsheet as a data source. Map each column to a field on the label, and map the barcode column to a barcode object.
- Add quantities. If you need twelve tags for one item and forty for another, include a quantity column in your export (or add one in the spreadsheet) and tell the label software to print that many copies per row.
- Print a test sheet and scan every code before you print the full run.
Choosing a printer and labels for small merchandise
Laser and inkjet printers with sheet labels are fine for occasional runs and larger items. If you tag merchandise every week, or you need small tags, a direct thermal or thermal transfer label printer is the better tool. It prints one label at a time from a roll, so you don’t waste half a sheet, and small sizes are easy to find.
- Direct thermal needs no ribbon. Labels can fade with heat and sunlight over time, which is usually fine for retail stock that sells within months.
- Thermal transfer uses a ribbon and lasts longer. Consider it for items that sit on shelves for a long time or near sunny windows.
- Small items such as jewelry, pins, and pencils often use narrow “barbell” or wraparound jewelry tags. Confirm your printer supports the label width and gap sensing for that stock before buying in bulk.
- Resolution matters on tiny labels. A higher-resolution printer gives you crisper bars when the barcode is only an inch wide.
Making small barcodes scan reliably
Shrinking a label is where most scanning problems start. A few habits help:
- Use Code 128 for internal codes. It’s compact, handles letters and numbers, and nearly every retail scanner reads it. Keep UPC-A for genuine manufacturer UPCs.
- Keep codes short. Fewer characters means wider bars in the same space, which scans more easily.
- Leave white space on both sides of the barcode. Scanners need a clear margin, and cramming the price right up against the bars is a common cause of misreads.
- Drop extra text before shrinking the barcode. On a tiny tag, the price and a short name are enough. Your full item description lives in Altru.
Testing before the shop opens
Open a plain text editor, click into it, and scan a label. You should see exactly the code stored in Altru, with nothing added or missing. Some scanners are set to add a prefix, suffix, or extra return; if the text doesn’t match, check the scanner’s configuration guide. Then ring up a test sale for a few items, including one from each label size you use, and void it. That catches mismatched codes before a guest is waiting at the register.
Quick answers
Do I need special software to print Altru barcodes?
Not necessarily. If your Altru setup doesn’t offer the label format you need, a query export plus the label software that comes with most thermal printers will do the job.
Can one printer handle both big and small labels?
Many desktop thermal printers accept several label widths, but you’ll swap rolls between sizes. Shops that tag a lot of small items sometimes keep a second printer loaded with jewelry tags.
Why does a label scan but the item isn’t found?
The scanned value doesn’t match what’s stored on the item in Altru. Compare the two character by character, and look for dropped leading zeros or scanner prefixes.
