A parent signs up for your spring homeschool series: twelve weeks, a few hundred dollars, and a polite question at the end of the call. “Can I pay monthly instead of all at once?” It’s a reasonable ask, especially for summer camps, multi-week classes, and year-long scout or teen programs. Then you go looking in Altru for a way to set it up and realize it isn’t obvious.
Here’s an honest look at what Altru gives you for recurring payments, why programs are the awkward case, and the workable options organizations actually use.
Where Altru’s recurring tools live
Altru does have recurring payment concepts, but they’re built around contributed revenue: recurring gifts and pledges with installment schedules. Depending on how your organization is set up, memberships may also have options for automatic renewal or installments. Those tools assume the money is a gift or a membership, with the receipting, acknowledgment, and revenue treatment that goes with that.
Program sales are different. A class registration or camp enrollment is earned revenue sold through program sales or a registration form, and it’s generally treated as a single transaction paid at the time of sale. We aren’t aware of a native way to attach an automatic installment schedule to a program sale. Altru changes over time, so confirm this for your own environment: test a program sale in a sandbox, or ask Blackbaud support directly whether payment plans are supported for programs in your version.
A shortcut to avoid
The tempting workaround is to enter the program balance as a pledge or recurring gift so Altru will schedule the installments for you. It works mechanically, but it causes problems downstream:
- The money shows up as a donation, which inflates fundraising totals and understates program revenue.
- The family may get a gift acknowledgment or tax receipt for what was really a tuition payment.
- Program attendance and the payment record aren’t linked, so nobody can easily tell who still owes for which class.
Talk to your finance team before going this route. Most will say no once they see how it lands in reports.
Options that hold up
1. Split the program into billable pieces
Instead of one twelve-week program, sell it as three monthly blocks (or a deposit item plus a balance item). Each block is its own program sale at its own price. Families enroll in all of them up front but pay for each block when it comes due. Revenue stays categorized correctly, and your program reports show exactly which blocks are paid.
The trade-off: it’s more setup per program, and you need a clear rule for what happens if someone pays block one and never pays block two.
2. Take a deposit and track the balance
For camps and expensive programs, a deposit at registration and the balance before the start date covers most of what families want. Record the deposit as the sale, note the balance owed on the constituent record or with an attribute, and build a query that lists everyone with an open balance and an upcoming start date. That query becomes your follow-up list.
3. Charge outside Altru and post the payments back
Some organizations run program installments through a separate payment processor with subscription billing, then enter each payment in Altru. This gives you true automatic charging, but someone has to reconcile two systems every month, and refunds or cancellations get messy. If you go this way, assign one person as the owner of that reconciliation and put it on a calendar.
Decisions to make before you offer payment plans
- Who qualifies. Everyone, or only programs above a certain price?
- Due dates. Tie them to the calendar month or to the program start date, and make sure the final payment lands before the program ends.
- Missed payments. Grace period, late reminder, and at what point a child can’t attend.
- Withdrawals and refunds. What a family owes, or gets back, if they leave halfway through.
- Card storage. Never write card numbers in notes or spreadsheets. If you need cards on file, use your payment processor’s tokenized storage.
Write these into your registration confirmation so families see the schedule before their first payment, not after.
Making the follow-up payments easier
With the split-program or deposit approach, the hard part is collecting the second and third payments without staff calling families to read card numbers over the phone. Link2Pay from Social Good creates branded pay-by-link requests for balances, deposits, and invoices, and the payments post back to Altru. It doesn’t charge automatically on a schedule; your team sends a link when each installment is due, and the family pays online.
Quick answers
Can I use Altru’s recurring gift feature for camp tuition?
You can technically, but it records tuition as a donation. Check with finance before doing it.
Do memberships work the same way as programs?
No. Memberships have their own renewal and payment settings, so whatever you’ve set up for members won’t automatically apply to program sales.
