Someone calls to book the courtyard for a wedding in June. They also want forty chairs, the portable PA, and two staff to set up. Before you can quote it, hold the date, or take a deposit, you have to decide how Altru should represent each piece of that request. That decision, more than any single setting, determines whether facility rentals stay manageable or turn into a side spreadsheet that nobody trusts.
Altru doesn’t have a dedicated rentals module the way some venue-booking systems do. Most organizations build rentals out of the event tools they already have, using locations for the spaces and resources for the things that go into them. Getting that split right is the foundation.
Locations vs. resources: the short version
The simplest rule of thumb we use:
- A location is a place that can only host one thing at a time. The courtyard, the boardroom, the classroom, the rooftop terrace. If two bookings land on the same location at the same time, that’s a conflict you need to catch.
- A resource is something you have a countable supply of. Chairs, round tables, projectors, easels, a PA system. Two events can draw from the same pool as long as the total doesn’t exceed what you own.
The question to ask about any item is: “Do I care about where it is, or how many are left?” Spaces are about where. Equipment is about how many.
The gray areas
A few things don’t sort themselves cleanly, and it helps to decide them up front:
- Divisible spaces. If your great hall can be split into east and west halves, you may need three locations (whole hall, east, west) and a staff habit of checking all three before booking. Be honest with yourself about whether Altru’s conflict checking will catch overlaps between a “whole” location and its halves. Test this in a sandbox before you rely on it; if it doesn’t, document a manual check.
- Staff. Set-up crews, security, and catering coordinators are sometimes tracked as resources so they show up on the event. That works for planning headcount, but it isn’t a scheduling system for named people. Decide whether you need “two security guards” or “Maria and James,” and track the latter elsewhere if so.
- Outdoor grounds. A lawn that hosts a festival and a small picnic at the same time is really a set of zones. Name the zones as locations rather than the whole lawn.
A setup order that avoids rework
- Inventory your rentable spaces. Walk the building with whoever books events today. List every space you actually rent, its realistic capacity, and any combinations you sell. Leave out spaces you never rent; they just clutter the picklist.
- Inventory equipment you lend out with rentals. Only include items where running out would be a real problem. Nobody needs to track quantities of tablecloths if you have two hundred.
- Configure locations and resources in Altru. Use names a new staff member would recognize from a floor plan, not internal nicknames. Add capacities and quantities as you go.
- Decide how a rental becomes a record. Most sites create an event for each rental and attach the location and resources to it. Agree on a naming convention (for example, date, client, and space) so rentals are easy to find and easy to separate from public programs in reports.
- Decide where the money goes. Rental fees, deposits, and damage charges need a home in revenue that your finance team agrees with. Talk to them before the first booking, not after month-end close. Whether you record payments through group sales, a sales order, or another route depends on how your organization already handles similar revenue; there isn’t one universally correct answer.
- Connect the renter to a constituent record. Renters are often future donors or members. Search for an existing constituent before creating a new one, and use a constituency or attribute so you can pull a list of past renters later.
- Run a dry booking. Book a fake rental end to end in a test environment: hold, quote, deposit, final payment, cancellation. Then book a second rental in the same space at an overlapping time and see what Altru tells you. That one test answers most of the “will it catch this?” questions.
Where Altru tends to fall short for rentals
It’s worth naming the limits so you plan around them instead of discovering them mid-season:
- Contracts and quotes usually live outside Altru. Many teams keep a contract template in a document tool and record the signed copy as an attachment or note on the constituent or event.
- Tentative holds can be awkward. Some organizations create the event with a clear “HOLD” prefix in the name and a follow-up date, then rename it once the deposit arrives. It’s low-tech, but it’s visible on the calendar.
- Setup and teardown time is easy to forget. If a wedding needs the room two hours early, make the booked time include that buffer, or your conflict checking will happily let a morning program overlap with setup.
- Renter-facing self-service generally isn’t part of Altru’s rental workflow. Expect inquiries to come in by phone or a website form and get entered by staff.
If you’re unsure whether your version of Altru handles a specific scenario natively, such as conflicts on combined spaces or partial-quantity resource warnings, ask Blackbaud support with a concrete example. A specific question (“if the whole hall is booked, will booking the east half show a conflict?”) gets a much more useful answer than a general one.
Keeping it clean after launch
Pick one person to own the location and resource lists. When a new space opens or equipment is retired, they update Altru the same week. Build a simple query of upcoming rentals by location so operations can see the next month at a glance, and review canceled rentals quarterly to make sure deposits and refunds were recorded the way finance expects.
The setup itself is a few hours of work. The part that makes it last is agreeing, as a team, on what counts as a location, what counts as a resource, and where every dollar lands.
