A school bus pulls up with 64 fourth graders, six chaperones, and a teacher holding a confirmation email. The person at the gate has a scanner and no barcode to point it at. Someone radios the group sales coordinator, the coordinator looks up the reservation, and the class waits on the sidewalk while staff count heads.
Group check-in in Altru is less about the scanner and more about what the group sale actually produces. Before you change hardware or train staff, figure out which of the situations below you are in.
Start with what your group sales output
Altru handles group sales differently from daily and advance sales. A group reservation carries an itinerary, a group size, pricing, and often a deposit and balance, and it may be booked months before anyone shows up. Whether that reservation ends up as individual barcoded tickets, one printed ticket set, or nothing scannable at all depends on how your organization processes and fulfills group orders.
We would not assume either way. Take a test group through your full process in a sandbox or on a low-stakes date: book it, take payment, fulfill it, then try to scan whatever comes out at the door. Note exactly what scanned, what didn’t, and what showed up as redeemed in Altru afterward. If the result is unclear, ask Blackbaud support how group tickets are meant to be fulfilled and redeemed in your setup. That one test answers more than any amount of guessing.
Three ways organizations handle it
1. Print and scan every ticket
If your group fulfillment produces one barcoded ticket per admission, you can scan them like any other ticket. This gives you the cleanest attendance data, since each redemption is recorded individually.
The catch is logistics. Someone has to print or send 70 tickets, and someone at the group has to hand them out. For school groups that usually means the teacher holds a stack and you scan the stack at the gate. That works, but it is slow at the moment you least want slow, and a missing ticket turns into a judgment call.
2. Check the group in as a unit
Many sites skip per-person scanning for groups. The group leader gives a name or confirmation number, a staff member finds the reservation, confirms the head count against what was booked, and marks the group as arrived. Any adjustment (three kids out sick, two extra chaperones) gets recorded on the reservation so billing and attendance stay accurate.
This is fast and friendly, but it moves the work from the scanner to whoever has access to the group record. If that person is in an office upstairs, you have recreated the sidewalk wait. Decide in advance who handles group arrivals and make sure they can see the day’s reservations at the entrance.
3. Sell small groups as advance tickets instead
Not every “group” needs group sales. A family reunion of twelve paying one price may be simpler as an advance sale, which produces standard tickets that scan like everything else. Reserve group sales for bookings that genuinely need what it offers: itineraries, deposits, invoicing, educator pricing, chaperone ratios, or program scheduling. Setting a clear threshold (for example, a minimum group size or “anything with a deposit or invoice”) keeps both processes cleaner.
Things to settle before the first busload
- Arrival list. Run a query each morning for groups scheduled that day, with leader name, organization, booked count, arrival time, and balance due. Print it or keep it on a tablet at the gate.
- Balance-due rule. Decide whether a group with an unpaid balance is admitted, held, or sent to the desk. Gate staff should not be making that call on the spot.
- Count changes. Agree on who records the actual number admitted and where. If that number never makes it back to Altru, your attendance reports and invoices will both be wrong.
- Separate lane. If you get more than a couple of groups at once, a dedicated group entrance or line keeps general admission moving.
- Confirmation wording. Tell group leaders exactly what to bring: printed tickets, a confirmation number, or just their name. Mismatched expectations cause most of the delay.
How to tell which approach fits
Per-ticket scanning makes sense when you need individual attendance records, admit groups to timed or capacity-limited areas, or tickets double as wristband or activity vouchers. Checking in as a unit fits when groups are mostly school field trips with a head count that changes on the day. Plenty of sites use both: unit check-in for schools, individual tickets for adult tours and private groups.
Whichever you pick, run it once end to end with real staff before a heavy field-trip season. The gaps show up right away: the query is missing a column, the scanner isn’t logged in, nobody knows who can edit the head count.
Scanning on phones and tablets
If your group orders do produce Altru tickets with barcodes, the hardware question is whether you have enough scanners where groups arrive. Social Good’s Ticket Scanner scans Altru tickets and membership barcodes on mobile devices, which makes it easier to put a scanning station at a group entrance or walk the line instead of funneling everyone to a fixed desk. It does not change how Altru fulfills group sales, so the testing and process decisions above still come first.
Quick answers
Can one barcode admit a whole group?
Don’t count on it. Test what your group fulfillment produces and how a scan of it is recorded in Altru before promising a group leader a single code.
Do we have to scan groups at all?
No. Many sites check groups in by reservation and record the actual count. What matters is that the admitted number ends up back on the Altru record.
