A fourth-grade teacher books a guided tour and a classroom workshop for 62 students. The school can’t pay with a card over the phone. Their business office wants an invoice with your tax ID, a PO number, and a due date before anyone cuts a check. You have the reservation in Altru, and you need a document that a district accounts payable clerk will actually accept.
This is one of the most common gaps for group sales staff. Scheduled programs handle the booking side well: dates, times, capacity, attendee counts, pricing. Producing a formal invoice and collecting on it is less clear-cut. Below is how to think about it, what to confirm in your own database, and a few workable approaches that keep the reservation and the money tied together.
Start by confirming what your Altru setup can print
Altru gives you a reservation record with the program, date, price, any deposit, and the balance due. Most organizations can also produce a confirmation or itinerary for the group. Whether that document can be shaped into something a school will treat as an invoice depends on your version, your configuration, and how much you’ve customized the output.
Before building a workaround, check two things:
- Print a confirmation for a test reservation in a sandbox or on a reservation you can safely cancel. Look for the fields a school needs: your organization’s legal name and address, an invoice or reference number, line items, amount due, due date, and remittance instructions.
- Ask Blackbaud support whether there is an invoice-style output for group reservations in your environment and whether it can be edited. Ask specifically about adding a PO number and payment terms, since those are the fields schools tend to insist on.
If the confirmation already has most of that, you may only need to adjust its wording and add a “Please remit by” line. If it doesn’t, use one of the approaches below.
Three ways organizations handle it
1. A merge template driven by a query
Build a group sales query that returns, for each reservation: the reservation or booking ID, the group’s organization name and contact, billing address, program name, date, attendee count, unit price, total, payments received, and balance. Export it and merge into a Word or Google Docs invoice template with your letterhead.
Use the Altru reservation ID as the invoice number. That one choice saves a lot of grief later: when a check arrives with “Invoice 10482” in the memo, anyone can find the reservation in seconds.
2. Invoice from your accounting system
Some finance teams prefer that all receivables live in the general ledger or accounting package. In that case, finance issues the invoice there, and the Altru reservation carries the same reference number. When payment comes in, it gets recorded in both places.
The risk is double entry. Agree in writing on who records the payment in Altru, how quickly, and which revenue batch it goes into, or you’ll end up with reservations that look unpaid in Altru while finance shows them settled.
3. Send a payment link with the confirmation
Plenty of schools, camps, and community groups can pay online with a district card if you give them a way to do it. Pairing a confirmation (or a simple invoice) with a secure payment link gets many of these paid without a paper check at all. You’ll still need a formal invoice for the groups whose policy requires one.
Recording the payment against the right reservation
However the invoice goes out, the payment has to land on the reservation, not as a loose payment on the school’s constituent record. A few habits keep this clean:
- Put the reservation ID on everything: the invoice, the confirmation email, the payment link description. Ask the school to include it on their check stub.
- Record deposits and final payments separately so the balance on the reservation stays accurate between them.
- Store the PO number somewhere searchable on the reservation, such as a note or an attribute your team agrees on, so finance can match remittances that only reference the PO.
- Watch the batch. Checks for group programs often arrive weeks after the visit. Make sure whoever enters them knows to apply them to the existing reservation rather than creating a new order.
Keep a balance-due list running
Invoices only work if someone follows up. Build a query of scheduled program reservations with a balance greater than zero, sorted by program date, and include the contact’s email and phone. Review it weekly. Reservations that are past the visit date and still unpaid are your collections list; ones coming up soon with no deposit may be a sign the group isn’t committed.
Decide your terms up front, too. Common choices are a deposit at booking with the balance due a set number of days before the visit, or full payment due within 30 days after the visit for public schools that can’t prepay. Whatever you pick, print it on the invoice and confirmation so the school’s office sees it.
Where Social Good can help
For groups that can pay electronically, Link2Pay sends a branded pay-by-link for group sales, invoices, and deposits, and the payment posts back to Altru. It doesn’t replace a formal invoice for schools that require one, but it gives everyone else a fast way to settle the balance.
Quick answers
Should the invoice number be separate from the Altru reservation ID?
Only if finance requires its own numbering. Otherwise, reusing the reservation ID makes matching payments much simpler.
What if a school pays the wrong amount?
Apply what you received to the reservation, leave the remaining balance open, and send an updated invoice showing the payment and the new amount due.
