A couple booked your garden pavilion for a wedding next June. They paid a deposit last fall, before you moved to Altru, through your old point-of-sale system, an invoice paid by check, or a card terminal at the front office. Now the reservation needs to live in Altru, and someone has to decide what to do with money that was already collected, deposited, and probably posted to your general ledger.
The real question isn’t how to type a payment into Altru. It’s how to make Altru show the right balance due without counting that cash twice. Get that wrong and you’ll either chase a client for money they already paid or report revenue your finance team already booked.
Start with finance, not the reservation
Before anyone enters a reservation, ask your finance lead one question: where does that deposit sit in the books right now? The answer usually falls into one of three places:
- Deferred revenue or a customer deposits liability. This is common when the event hasn’t happened yet. The money is held until the rental takes place.
- Already recognized as rental income. Some smaller organizations book deposits as income the day they arrive.
- Sitting in a clearing or suspense account because nobody was sure what to do with it during the transition.
Whichever it is, Altru should not create a second cash deposit for the same dollars. What Altru needs is a record that the client paid, so the balance is right and staff stop asking for money the client doesn’t owe.
Three ways organizations handle it
1. Record the prior payment with a dedicated payment method
This is the cleanest option for most teams. Set up a payment method (or use an existing “other” type) with a name that says exactly what it is, such as “Prior system deposit” or “Pre-conversion payment.” Apply the deposit to the reservation in Altru using that method and the original amount. In the reference or notes field, record the original payment date, the old receipt or check number, and the system it came from.
Then make sure that payment method is left out of your bank deposit process and that its general ledger mapping points to the account finance named above, not to cash. If your Altru GL setup can map it to the liability or clearing account, the entry offsets what finance already booked instead of duplicating it. Test this in a sandbox or on a single reservation first, and have finance review the resulting batch before you post anything.
2. Enter only the remaining balance
Some teams skip the deposit entirely and price the reservation in Altru at what’s still owed, with a note on the reservation and the constituent record explaining the prior payment. It’s fast and it keeps cash clean.
The tradeoff: Altru will never show the full value of the rental. Revenue reports, giving and spending history on the constituent record, and any “total spent” smart fields will be understated. If rental revenue reporting matters to you, or if the renter is also a member or donor whose lifetime value you track, this option creates gaps you’ll notice later.
3. Leave historical rentals outside Altru
For rentals that are already finished and paid in full, there’s often little reason to bring them in at all. Keep the old records accessible, add a note on the constituent record that they’ve rented before, and start fresh with new bookings. Conversion effort is better spent on future reservations with open balances.
A short checklist for the reservations you do bring in
- Pull a list from the old system of every future rental with a payment on it: client, event date, total contract, amount paid, payment dates, and receipt numbers.
- Reconcile that list to finance’s deposit balance. The totals should match. If they don’t, find out why before anything goes into Altru.
- Find or create the constituent record for each renter. Search carefully first; conversions are a prime time to create duplicates, especially for organizations that rent under a business name while the contact is an individual.
- Create the reservation in whatever area your organization uses for rentals. In many Altru setups that’s group sales, but configurations differ, so follow your own process.
- Apply the prior payment using the method you chose, with consistent notes.
- Run a query of reservations with that payment method. Its total should match the reconciled list from step 2. Keep this query; it’s your audit trail.
- Review the batch with finance before posting, if your process posts these to the GL at all.
Things that commonly go sideways
- Using “cash” or “check” for the converted amount. It looks fine at entry, then shows up in the daily deposit and the drawer reconciliation is off by thousands of dollars.
- Using today’s date with no note. Six months later nobody remembers the payment actually arrived a year earlier. Always record the original date somewhere searchable.
- Refunds on converted deposits. If a renter cancels and is owed money back, the original payment was processed outside Altru, so the refund probably can’t go back to their card through Altru. Plan to issue it the same way it came in (or by check) and document it on the reservation so the balance zeroes out.
- Staff entering these piecemeal. Have one or two people do every converted rental so the method, notes, and dates are consistent.
When you’re unsure what Altru will do
How a payment method posts, whether it can be excluded from deposits, and how it appears in revenue reports all depend on your organization’s configuration. If you’re not certain, enter a test reservation in a sandbox or a single real one you can reverse, look at the resulting revenue and batch records, and confirm with finance. Blackbaud support can also confirm how your specific setup treats a non-cash payment method before you enter dozens of them.
Once the converted rentals are in and the query ties out, write the method down in your procedures document. You’ll want it again the next time money arrives through a channel Altru didn’t see.
