The register went down Saturday afternoon, so the desk switched to a paper tally and a card reader that wasn’t connected to Altru. It’s now Monday and someone has to get Saturday’s visitors from that tally sheet into the system. Ring them up in daily sales today and Saturday looks empty while Monday looks like a holiday weekend.
That’s the core problem with backdating admission in Altru: daily sales is built to record what is happening at the register right now. Before you pick a workaround, it helps to separate the two things you’re actually trying to fix.
Two different numbers, two different fixes
When people say they need to “record admission for a previous date,” they usually mean one or both of these:
- Attendance: how many people came through the door on that day, by ticket type. This feeds board reports, grant reporting, staffing plans, and year-over-year comparisons.
- Revenue: the money collected that day, which has to match the deposit and the general ledger for the right accounting period.
These don’t have to be solved the same way. Finance often cares that the money lands in the correct period. Visitor services and leadership care that the head count shows up on the correct date. Decide which one matters for this situation before you touch anything, because the cleanest fix for one can make the other messier.
What Altru gives you to work with
In our experience, daily sales transactions take the date they are processed. As far as we know, there isn’t a supported way for front-desk staff to pick an earlier date when ringing up walk-up admission. Behavior can vary with your version, security rights, and configuration, so confirm it in your own environment before you write procedures around it. Test in a sandbox if you have one, or ask Blackbaud support directly whether a backdated daily sales transaction is possible in your setup.
What you can usually adjust after the fact is the money side. Depending on how your organization handles daily sales reconciliation, deposits, and posting to the general ledger, your finance team may be able to set the deposit or post date so the revenue lands in the right period even if the transaction itself carries today’s date. Talk to whoever owns reconciliation before anyone enters the catch-up sales, not after.
Practical options, from simplest to most involved
1. Enter the sales now and document the date
Ring up the missed admissions in daily sales with today’s date, using the correct ticket types and payment methods. Keep the catch-up entries together in their own session or drawer if your setup allows it, and record the real visit date somewhere staff and finance will see it: a note on the reconciliation, a comment on the batch or deposit, or a shared log. This is the least disruptive option and keeps your payment records accurate. The tradeoff is that attendance reports by transaction date will show the visits on the wrong day.
2. Correct the attendance report, not the transactions
If the visits need to appear on the right day for reporting, consider keeping a small adjustments list (date, ticket type, count, reason) and applying it when you produce attendance numbers. Many organizations already export attendance into a spreadsheet for board or grant reporting, so an adjustment column is a modest change. It’s not elegant, but it’s honest and auditable, and it doesn’t require bending Altru’s transaction history.
3. Use a dedicated program or ticket type for offline admissions
Some teams set up a separate program or price type used only for catch-up entries. That makes them easy to find in queries and easy to exclude or reassign in reports. If you go this way, make sure the new item maps to the same revenue accounts as regular admission so finance doesn’t end up with a new line to explain. Check with your Altru administrator and finance lead before creating it.
4. Ask about a back-end correction
For a large gap, such as several days of downtime, it may be worth asking Blackbaud support whether a correction on their side is possible. Don’t assume it is, and don’t try to edit dates directly in the database. Get a clear answer about what’s supported and what it would affect, including deposits that are already closed.
Keep the next one smaller
You can’t prevent every outage, but you can make the recovery easier:
- Keep a paper fallback sheet at every register with columns for time, ticket type, quantity, payment method, and the last four digits of the card or receipt number. A clean tally turns a guessing exercise into data entry.
- Agree on the catch-up procedure in advance. Who enters the sales, when, under which session or drawer, and how the real date is recorded. Write it down where seasonal staff can find it.
- Tell finance the same day. A heads-up before reconciliation saves a lot of unwinding later.
- Build a saved query for your catch-up ticket type or session so you can pull those entries quickly at month end.
Quick answers
Can I change the date on a daily sales transaction after it’s saved?
We’re not aware of a supported way for regular users to do this. Confirm with Blackbaud support for your specific configuration before relying on it.
Will entering sales today throw off my deposit?
Not if the catch-up entries go through normal reconciliation and finance knows they’re coming. The bigger risk is someone treating them as Monday’s walk-up revenue without context.
What about advance sales for a past date?
Advance sales are meant for future visits, and selecting a date that has already passed may not be allowed. Test it in a sandbox before building a process around it.
