“How did admissions do last month?” sounds like a simple question until two people pull numbers from Altru and get different answers. One counted tickets by the day they were sold. The other counted by the day guests were supposed to visit. Both were right, and neither showed how many people actually walked through the door.
Admission reporting gets much easier once you treat each ticket as moving through a cycle and decide which stage you’re measuring. This guide walks through the stages, the date fields that drive them, and how to build reports in Altru that hold up when the board asks follow-up questions.
The admission cycle, stage by stage
A typical admission moves through four points, and each one answers a different question:
- Sale. The ticket is purchased online, at the desk through daily sales, through advance sales, or as part of a group sale. This is a revenue question: what did we sell, and through which channel?
- Scheduled visit. For timed or dated tickets, there’s a program or event date the ticket is good for. This is a capacity question: how full is next Saturday?
- Redemption. The ticket is scanned or marked used. This is an attendance question: who actually came?
- After the visit. Refunds, exchanges, no-shows, and whether the visitor later bought a membership or came back. This is an outcomes question.
Most reporting arguments happen because someone pulls stage 1 data to answer a stage 3 question. Sales from an advance-purchase rush in December say little about attendance in January.
Pick the date before you pick the report
The single most useful habit is naming the date in every admission report title. “Tickets by transaction date, Q3” and “Tickets by visit date, Q3” are two different reports, and labeling them that way prevents most of the confusion.
- Transaction date lines up with revenue, deposits, and finance. Use it for anything that has to tie out to batches or the general ledger.
- Program or event date lines up with operations. Use it for staffing, capacity, and attendance forecasting.
- Redemption or scan date is the closest thing to true attendance. How reliably it’s populated depends on whether your team scans every ticket or waves some guests through, so check that before trusting it.
Start with the built-in reports
Altru ships with standard sales and attendance reports, and for many monthly questions they’re enough. Run one for a period you already know well, such as a month where you remember roughly how busy things were, and confirm which date it filters on. If the report doesn’t say, compare its total against a query you build yourself with an explicit date filter. Report options vary by configuration, so if a number looks off, Blackbaud support can confirm what a given report includes.
Watch for a few common gaps in standard reports:
- Member admissions with no charge may or may not be counted, depending on how they’re processed.
- Refunded or exchanged tickets can appear in sales but should come out of attendance.
- Group sales are often handled through a separate workflow and may need their own report.
Build queries for the questions reports don’t answer
When you need to follow a ticket through the whole cycle, an ad-hoc query is the more flexible tool. A query that’s useful for admission-cycle work usually includes:
- Transaction date and program or event date, side by side
- Price type (adult, child, member, comp) and sales channel (online, desk, group)
- Ticket status or redemption information
- Quantity and amount, so you can report heads and dollars from the same output
- The constituent record, where one exists, so you can look at repeat visits and membership conversion
With both dates in one query, you can calculate lead time (how far ahead people book) and no-show rate (sold for a date but never redeemed). Those two numbers are often more useful for planning than raw totals. Walk-up daily sales frequently have no constituent attached, so expect conversion and repeat-visit analysis to cover only the share of visitors you can identify.
Save these as shared queries with clear names, and if you add a smart field for something you check often, such as a constituent’s last visit date, document what it counts so the next administrator doesn’t have to reverse-engineer it.
Comparing cycles over time
Year-over-year comparisons are where admission reporting tends to fall apart. A few practices keep them honest:
- Compare by visit date for attendance and by transaction date for revenue. Don’t mix them in one chart.
- Align by day of week, not just calendar date, especially around holidays and school breaks.
- Note price changes, new ticket types, and closures alongside the numbers. A spike that came from a free day isn’t a trend.
- Freeze a copy of each period’s results. If records get edited later, rerunning last year’s query may not give last year’s answer.
Getting the numbers somewhere people will look at them
Many teams end up exporting query results to a spreadsheet every week to build a running trend view. That works, but it depends on someone remembering to do it the same way each time. Data Bridge from Social Good syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets and other tools, so a saved admission-cycle query can feed a shared sheet without a manual export. The query design above still matters most; the sync just keeps the output current.
Quick answers
Why don’t my sales and attendance totals match?
Usually because they use different dates, or because refunds, comps, and unscanned tickets are treated differently. Put both dates in one query and the gap is usually easy to explain.
Can I get true headcount from Altru?
Only as accurate as your redemption process. If every guest is scanned or marked used, redemption data is a good proxy. If not, treat it as an estimate and say so in the report.
