A credit card payment that looked fine at the register turns out to be bad. The card was reported lost or stolen, the charge was disputed, or the transaction never actually settled with your processor. By the time anyone notices, the payment is already sitting in a bank deposit in Altru, and that deposit is locked. You try to pull the payment out and Altru won’t let you.
That refusal is deliberate. A locked deposit is meant to match what hit the bank, and once it has been reconciled or posted, editing it would quietly change numbers your finance team has already signed off on. The good news is that you almost never need to remove the payment. You need to offset it, in a way that leaves a clear trail.
First, figure out what actually happened to the money
“Lost card” covers a few different situations, and each one gets handled a little differently:
- The money arrived, then was taken back. This is a chargeback or dispute. Your processor deposited the funds and later debited them. The original deposit in Altru is correct; the chargeback is a new, separate event.
- The money never arrived. The authorization looked good, but the charge failed to settle or was voided on the processor side. Here the original deposit in Altru overstates what reached the bank.
- The money arrived and you chose to refund it. A guest called to say their card was stolen and the purchase wasn’t theirs, and you refunded before any dispute was filed.
Pull the processor’s settlement or dispute report for that date before touching Altru. It tells you which of these you’re dealing with, and it gives you the reference number you’ll want in your notes.
The cleaner path: leave the locked deposit alone
For chargebacks and refunds, the original deposit was accurate on the day it was made. Don’t reopen it. Instead:
- Record the reversal on the original transaction. Process a refund or return against the sale, membership, or donation so the constituent’s record and revenue reflect that they didn’t pay. How you do this depends on the revenue type, so follow the same process you use for any other refund on that kind of transaction.
- Let the refund land in a current, open deposit. The negative amount shows up in the deposit for the period when the chargeback or refund actually happened, which is also when the bank debit shows up on your statement. That’s what makes reconciliation work.
- Note the reason on the constituent record. Include the processor’s dispute or reference number. Six months from now, someone will ask why a member’s status changed, and that note is the only explanation they’ll find.
- Decide what happens to any benefits. If the bad payment bought a membership or tickets, the refund doesn’t automatically mean you’ve decided whether to cancel the membership or void the tickets. Make that call on purpose and record it.
This approach keeps every closed period intact. Your finance team sees a debit and a matching negative in the month it happened, and nobody has to reopen a reconciliation.
When the payment truly never settled
This one is harder, because the locked deposit really does include money the bank never received. You have two realistic options.
Unlock and correct, if the period is still open
If the deposit hasn’t been reconciled against a bank statement and hasn’t been posted to the general ledger, it may be possible to unlock it, remove or adjust the payment, and lock it again. Whether your account can do this depends on your security role and how your organization has set up deposits and posting. If you don’t see a way to unlock it, don’t assume it’s impossible; ask whoever administers Altru security, or check with Blackbaud support, before trying workarounds.
Even when you can unlock it, talk to finance first. A deposit that has already been matched to a bank line will stop matching the moment you change it.
Offset it, if the period is closed or posted
If the deposit has been posted or the month is closed, treat the failed settlement like a refund: reverse the payment on the original transaction and let the negative amount fall into a current deposit. Your accountant may want a short memo tying the two together, since the “missing” money and the correction now live in different periods. That’s normal and much easier to explain than a changed historical deposit.
Things that make this worse
- Deleting the transaction outright. Even if your permissions allow it, you lose the history of what was sold and to whom, and revenue reports for the original date change without explanation.
- Adjusting a different payment to “make the total right.” The deposit balances, but now two constituent records are wrong.
- Fixing it in Altru without telling finance. If the general ledger was already posted, your change and their books will disagree, and someone will spend a day finding out why.
Preventing the next one
You can’t stop cards from being lost or stolen, but you can catch problems sooner. Reconcile processor settlement reports against Altru daily or weekly rather than monthly, so a failed settlement turns up while its deposit is still open. Hold off on locking deposits until the processor’s settlement for that day has cleared. And keep a short written procedure for chargebacks, so whoever handles the next dispute follows the same steps you just worked through.
If your setup behaves differently from what’s described here, test the refund and deposit steps in a sandbox or training database first. Deposit and posting configurations vary a lot between organizations, and a five-minute test is cheaper than a reopened month.
