Every spring the same scramble happens: a dozen seasonal cashiers start Saturday, an education intern starts Monday, and someone asks whether they can all just use the “frontdesk” login. They shouldn’t. Shared accounts feel faster for about a week, until a refund goes missing, a constituent record gets overwritten, or a former intern can still sign in from home in October.
Setting up short-term staff properly in Altru isn’t hard. It mostly comes down to three decisions: one login per person, a small set of narrow roles built ahead of time, and a firm habit for turning access off when the season ends.
Give every person their own login
Altru sign-in runs through each person’s Blackbaud ID, which is tied to an individual email address. That design is the point: every sale, refund, edit, and deletion is stamped with the user who did it. With a shared login, your audit trail says “frontdesk” did it, which helps nobody.
Individual logins also matter for payment security. Card-handling standards generally expect each person who touches payment data to have a unique ID, and your auditor or processor may ask how you meet that. “Seasonal staff share one account” is not a comfortable answer.
Two practical notes:
- Temps need an email address they control. If they don’t have an organizational account, decide in advance whether you’ll create one or let them use a personal address. Organizational addresses are easier to shut off later.
- Check your user count before the season. How Altru licenses users depends on your contract. If you’re not sure whether adding ten seasonal users changes anything, ask your Blackbaud account contact before hiring, not the week they start.
Build short-term roles before you need them
Access in Altru is controlled through system roles, which bundle the features and tasks a user can reach. The trap is copying a full-time staff member’s role onto a new hire because it’s quick. Full-time roles accumulate permissions over the years, and an intern rarely needs any of them.
Create a few purpose-built roles once, name them clearly, and reuse them every year. A typical starting set:
Seasonal cashier
- Daily sales: sell admission, programs, and memberships at the counter.
- Look up and add constituents, so members can be found and new buyers recorded.
- Scan or redeem tickets if that’s part of the job.
- No refunds or voids, or only with supervisor approval. No price or program configuration. No access to revenue reports, batches, or deleting records.
Advance sales or reservations temp
- Everything in the cashier role, plus advance sales and group sales if they’ll be booking school or tour groups.
- Still no ability to change event setup, pricing, or discounts.
Intern (development, membership, or marketing)
- Read access to constituent records and the specific queries or reports their project uses.
- Limited edit rights, such as updating contact information or adding notes, if their work requires it.
- No revenue entry, no batch posting, no merging or deleting constituents, no administration or security settings.
Treat these as starting points. Altru’s permission list is long, and whether a given task sits where you expect can vary, so test each role before anyone uses it. The simplest way: create a test user, assign only the new role, sign in as that user, and try the tasks the person actually needs plus a few they shouldn’t be able to do. If you have a sandbox or training environment, do this there. If you’re unsure whether a specific permission exists, Blackbaud support can confirm it.
Watch the less obvious access
Roles aren’t the only thing that decides what a temp can see:
- Exports and queries. If a role can run or export queries, the user can pull constituent lists out of Altru. Interns working on a mailing project may need this; cashiers almost never do.
- Cash handling and reconciliation. Decide how seasonal staff’s daily sales will be counted and reconciled (individually or under a supervisor’s sign-off), and make sure their access matches that process.
- Payment card details. Keep viewing stored payment information out of any short-term role.
- Remote access. Altru is web-based, so unless your organization has added its own restrictions, a working login can be used from outside the building. That’s one more reason to remove access promptly.
Make offboarding part of the schedule
The most common gap isn’t too much access on day one. It’s access that never gets removed. A few habits fix that:
- Record an end date when you create the user. Keep a simple list of seasonal and intern users with their expected last day.
- Remove roles and deactivate the user on the last day. Don’t delete history; just make sure the account can no longer do anything. Confirm with Blackbaud how inactive users are handled on your account so you’re not counting people who have left.
- Review every user at the end of each season. Run through the full user list with your manager. Anyone who isn’t currently working gets turned off.
- Rehire cleanly. When a returning seasonal worker comes back next year, reassign the standard role instead of restoring whatever they had last time.
Quick answers
Is it ever OK to share a login for a one-day event?
It’s tempting, but you lose accountability for every transaction made under it. Set up individual accounts ahead of the event instead; with ready-made roles, it goes quickly.
Should an intern get the same role as the staff member supervising them?
Usually not. Give them a role scoped to their project and add permissions only when a real task requires it.
What if a temp needs one extra permission mid-season?
Add it to that person temporarily, or create a second small role you can attach and remove, rather than permanently widening the standard seasonal role.
