Someone in the gift shop wants a simple answer: how many of the plush otters have we sold since spring, and at what price? You open the merchandise item in Altru expecting a list of every sale, and what you find is the item’s setup: name, department, price, maybe inventory details. The sales themselves live somewhere else.
That’s normal. In Altru, a merchandise item is mostly a definition of what you sell. The transactions are stored on the sales orders that included it. So to see an item’s history you go to where the sales are recorded, not to the item. Below is how to do that, plus the gaps to know about before you promise anyone a number.
The short version
- The merchandise item record isn’t really built to show its own sales history. Don’t spend time hunting for a hidden tab.
- The dependable route is an ad-hoc query on sales orders (or sales order items), filtered to the item you care about.
- Standard sales reports help for totals over a date range. A query is better when you need line-level detail you can sort, filter, and export.
Building an item sales history query
Field and node names vary a bit depending on your Altru version and what your organization has set up, so treat this as a map rather than a click-by-click script.
- Start from the sales side. Create a new ad-hoc query using a sales order source. You want each row to be a line item on an order, not a whole order, so look for the node that holds the individual items on the order.
- Filter to the item. Add a filter on the item name (or item ID if your names are inconsistent). If you want a whole category, filter on the merchandise department instead.
- Add a date filter. Use the transaction or order date and set a range. Leaving it open on a busy database makes the query slow and the results hard to read.
- Choose output fields. At a minimum: transaction date, item name, quantity, unit price, line total. Useful extras include the sales channel (daily sales at the register versus online or advance sales), the user or register that rang it up, and the constituent if one was attached.
- Save it with a clear name such as “Merch – item sales by date,” and put it in a shared folder so the shop manager can run it without rebuilding it.
Once it runs, export to Excel and a pivot table gives you units and revenue by month in a couple of minutes. That’s usually what the person asking actually wanted.
Things that can make the numbers look wrong
Refunds and exchanges
A return may show up as its own transaction rather than reducing the original line. Before reporting a total, check whether your query is picking up refunds and whether they come through as negative quantities or need a separate filter. Run the query for a week where you know a return happened and confirm how it appears.
Price changes and discounts
If the item’s price changed during the year, or staff applied discounts at the register, the line total won’t equal quantity times the current price. Pull the actual line amount rather than calculating it.
Sales that never touched Altru
Plenty of organizations run the gift shop on a separate retail point of sale and only bring summary revenue into Altru. If that’s you, the item-level history is in the retail system, and no Altru query will recreate it. Check with whoever closes out the shop each day before assuming the data is there.
Duplicate or renamed items
If someone created “Otter Plush” and later “Otter Plush – Large” as a separate item, history is split across both. Filtering by department, or using an “includes” match on the name, catches the variants. It’s also a good prompt to clean up the item list.
What about inventory?
Sales history and inventory are related but aren’t the same question. If you track on-hand quantities for merchandise in Altru, the inventory side tells you what’s left, not who bought what or when. How much inventory detail your Altru setup keeps depends on configuration. If you need a full movement log (received, sold, adjusted), test what your database actually records in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before you build a process around it.
Making it repeatable
The one-off query solves today’s question. The better habit is a small set of saved merchandise queries the shop team can run on their own:
- Item sales by date range: the query above, with the item and date left as prompts if your version supports it.
- Department totals by month: for buying decisions and year-over-year comparisons.
- Top sellers: the same source, grouped by item and sorted by quantity, for reorder planning.
Save them in a shared folder, write one line in the description explaining what each returns, and the next “how many of these did we sell” request takes thirty seconds instead of an afternoon.
Quick answers
Can I see who bought a specific item?
Only for sales where a constituent was attached to the order. Most walk-up gift shop sales are anonymous, so expect many blank rows.
Why doesn’t my query total match the daily sales report?
Usually it’s date handling (transaction date versus deposit or post date), refunds, or tax being included in one and not the other. Compare a single day line by line to find which.
