Your finance director pulls last quarter’s admissions revenue from Altru for the board packet. Three weeks later someone reruns the same report for the same date range, and the total is different. Nobody “broke” anything. A refund was processed, a group sale was adjusted, and a batch that was still open got committed. The report was right both times. It was answering a slightly different question each time.
That gap is the whole problem with point-in-time revenue in Altru. Below is how to tell which question you are really asking, what Altru can answer on its own, and how to build a snapshot habit so the number you reported in June is still the number you can find in December.
Two questions that sound the same
“What was our revenue for March?” This is a date-range question. Altru handles it well: filter revenue reports or a revenue query by transaction date and you get March activity.
“What did our March revenue look like on April 5, when we closed the month?” This is a point-in-time question. You want the figure as it stood on a specific day, frozen, ignoring anything that changed afterward. Standard Altru reports generally read the current state of the data, so rerunning them later reflects every edit, refund, and late-posted batch since then.
Before you build anything, ask whoever wants the number which of these they mean. Board and audit requests are almost always the second one, even when they are phrased like the first.
What changes old numbers after the fact
- Refunds and returns on tickets, memberships, or merchandise from an earlier period.
- Edits to revenue records, such as a corrected amount, a changed designation, or a re-split between funds.
- Batches that were still uncommitted when the first report ran.
- Group sales and advance sales that get adjusted, cancelled, or paid in stages.
- Constituent merges, which do not change totals but can change how revenue is attributed when you report by constituent or household.
Whether a given report counts a refund on the original sale date or on the refund date varies by report and by how your organization posts. If you are not sure how a specific report behaves, test it: process a small refund in a sandbox (or against a test constituent you clean up afterward), then run the report for both periods and see where it lands.
Option 1: Lean on your posting process
If your organization posts Altru revenue to a general ledger, the GL is usually the real point-in-time record. Posted batches are, in practice, your closed periods, and later corrections tend to show up as new activity rather than rewriting history. Two habits make this hold up:
- Close each month on a fixed schedule and post everything for that month before you report it.
- Agree that the official revenue figure comes from posted data, not from a live Altru report run whenever someone asks.
How strictly Altru locks posted transactions depends on your configuration and permissions. Confirm with Blackbaud support or your finance lead what staff can still edit after posting before you rely on it.
Option 2: Snapshot the report on close day
The simplest reliable method is also the least glamorous: on close day, run the reports you will need and save them.
- Pick a short, fixed list of reports or revenue queries that answer the questions you get asked (by revenue type, by program, by designation, by channel).
- Run them on the same business day each month, after batches are committed.
- Export to PDF for a human-readable copy and to a spreadsheet for the detail.
- File them in a shared folder named by period and run date, for example 2026-03 revenue, run 2026-04-05.
- Write the run date on anything you hand to the board, so nobody compares it to a later rerun and assumes an error.
Keep the detail export, not just the summary. When someone asks why March dropped by a few hundred dollars between reports, comparing two detail files line by line answers it in minutes.
Option 3: Build a query you can rerun and reconcile
A revenue query with transaction date, amount, revenue type, designation, and batch information gives you something you can export at any time and compare against an earlier snapshot. If your query includes any date fields that record when a record was added or last changed, those help explain differences, but availability depends on the query view, so check what your version exposes rather than assuming. The query does not freeze history by itself; it just makes your snapshots consistent from month to month.
Making snapshots less manual
The weak point in all of this is that someone has to remember to export on close day. Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets and other tools, so your revenue query can land in a spreadsheet without a manual export. You would still copy that sheet’s values to a dated tab on close day to freeze it, but the data pull itself stops being a chore.
Quick answers
Can I set an “as of” date on an Altru revenue report?
Not that we would rely on. Reports filter by transaction date range, which is different from seeing the data as it existed on a past day. If you need certainty for a specific report, ask Blackbaud support whether it supports an as-of parameter.
Why don’t my old snapshot and today’s report match?
Usually refunds, edits, or batches committed after the snapshot. Compare the two detail exports and the differences tend to explain themselves.
