Plenty of cultural organizations run two Blackbaud databases side by side: Altru for admissions, memberships, and the front desk, and Raiser’s Edge NXT for major gifts, grants, and the development team. That split usually makes sense on paper. In practice it means money lands in one system and somebody has to prove, every day, that the other system agrees.
Two things trip people up. First, there is no out-of-the-box sync between Altru and RE NXT that you can count on to keep gifts matched, so reconciliation is a process you design, not a report you run. If you have heard of a connector or custom integration at your organization, confirm with Blackbaud support or your account rep exactly what it moves and when before you build a routine around it. Second, the work gets much harder during a fundraiser, when gift volume spikes and the same donor can show up in both databases in the same afternoon.
Start by deciding which system owns each kind of money
Reconciliation falls apart when nobody can say where a given dollar is supposed to live. Before you touch a query, write a one-page rule set your finance and development staff both sign off on. A common version looks like this:
- Altru owns admissions, memberships, program and event registrations, store sales, and small donations taken at the desk or through Altru web forms.
- RE NXT owns major gifts, pledges and pledge payments, grants, appeals, planned gifts, and anything a gift officer manages.
- Gray areas (a donation added on to a membership, a gala ticket with a tax-deductible portion, a gift from a member who is also a prospect) get an explicit rule: entered in one place, copied to the other, never entered twice.
The “copied, never entered twice” part matters most. If a gift is keyed into both systems by different people, you will eventually double-count it in a board report.
A daily reconciliation routine that holds up
Pick one person to own this, with a backup. It should take minutes on a normal day, not an hour.
- Pull yesterday’s donations from Altru. Build a revenue query filtered to donation application types for the prior business day, with constituent name, lookup ID, amount, payment method, designation or fund, and the transaction date. Save it so the date filter is the only thing that changes.
- Pull the matching gifts from RE NXT. Use the gift list or batch view for the same date range and the gift types you copy over from Altru.
- Compare totals before details. Match the grand total, then totals by payment method (card, cash, check). If those agree, you are usually done. If they do not, drop to line-by-line.
- Tie both to the deposit. The bank or merchant deposit is the neutral referee. A gift in Altru that is missing from NXT is a copy problem; a gift in both that is missing from the deposit is a payment problem, and those go to different people.
- Log exceptions in one place. A shared spreadsheet with date, donor, amount, which system is wrong, and who fixed it is enough. Patterns in that log tell you where your process leaks.
Make matching easier with a shared identifier
Name matching is where most of the time goes. If you can store the Altru lookup ID on the RE NXT record (or the NXT constituent ID in Altru, in a constituent attribute or similar field), matching becomes a lookup instead of a judgment call. Check whether your Altru configuration already has an attribute category you can use before creating a new one, and keep the format consistent.
Mark what has been copied
Whatever method you use to move gifts, you need a way to know which Altru donations have already gone to NXT. Some teams use a revenue-level attribute or note; others rely on a dated export file per day. Test in a sandbox or on a few records whether your version of Altru lets you add an attribute to revenue the way you want, and whether it is reportable in queries, before you depend on it.
Gift processing during a fundraiser
A gala, giving day, or year-end push can produce more gifts in two days than you see in a month. The daily routine still applies, but a few adjustments save a lot of cleanup:
- Choose one entry point per channel ahead of time. If paddle-raise gifts go into NXT and ticket purchases go into Altru, tell every volunteer and staff member before the event, not during.
- Clean duplicates first. Run a duplicate check on likely attendees in both systems a week or two out. A donor who exists twice in Altru and once in NXT turns one gift into a three-way puzzle.
- Batch by channel and date. Use separate batches for online gifts, event-night pledges, checks received by mail, and so on. Name them consistently (event, channel, date) so anyone can find them later.
- Set a posting cutoff. Decide when gifts stop being entered for the event’s first report and when the second pass happens. Development will want a total the next morning; finance will want one that matches the deposit. Give them both, labeled.
- Handle split transactions on purpose. A gala ticket with a fair-market-value portion and a deductible portion should be recorded the same way every time. Agree on the treatment with finance before tickets go on sale.
- Reconcile daily through the campaign, not at the end. Catching a mismatch on day two takes five minutes. Untangling a week of them takes an afternoon.
Moving the gifts themselves
Most organizations without an integration export an Altru query to a file and import it into RE NXT, using NXT’s import tools or gift batches. That works, but a few habits keep it reliable: export with the same saved query every time, keep the file in a dated folder, never edit amounts in the spreadsheet (fix the source record instead), and have someone other than the importer spot-check a few gifts after each import. If volume is high enough that the manual step is a real burden, that is the point to ask Blackbaud or a partner about an automated option, with a clear list of which gift types need to move.
Quick answers
Should members’ add-on donations go to NXT?
Only if development needs them for stewardship or reporting. Many teams keep them in Altru and copy a periodic summary instead of every small gift. Decide once and document it.
Which number is “right” when the systems disagree?
Neither, until it matches the deposit. Reconcile to the bank, then correct whichever system is off.
