A school group books a field trip online, picks “pay when we arrive,” and shows up three weeks later with a check. The person at the desk pulls up the order and sees nothing unusual, so they either wave the group in without collecting or spend ten minutes figuring out whether anything is owed. What staff wanted was a flag on the screen saying this order still needs payment.
That’s a reasonable thing to want, and it’s harder in Altru than it sounds. Below is what to look at, the workarounds that hold up, and when it makes more sense to stop offering pay-on-arrival online at all.
Two different pop-ups
“Show a pop-up” can mean two separate things, and it helps to decide which one you need before you start configuring anything:
- A message to the patron while they’re buying online, telling them their tickets are reserved, payment is due at arrival, and what happens if they don’t show.
- An alert to staff at the point of sale when that patron or order comes up, so nobody forgets to collect.
The first is mostly a content problem. The second is the one that causes lost revenue.
The patron-facing message
Altru’s web forms let you add descriptive text and confirmation content, so you can usually state the pay-on-arrival terms on the form itself and repeat them in the confirmation. A true modal pop-up is a different matter. Whether you can inject one depends on how your forms are embedded on your site and what your web team is allowed to change around them. Test any custom script in a non-production setting first, because form updates on Blackbaud’s side can break it without warning.
Whatever the mechanism, keep the message short and specific: the amount due, the accepted payment methods, the hold policy, and who to contact if plans change. Then put the same wording in the confirmation email so the patron has it in writing.
The staff-facing alert
This is where you should check carefully rather than assume. Altru doesn’t appear to have a built-in way to flag an online order as “unpaid, collect on arrival” and pop that up at the register. Before building workarounds, confirm for your own version: try it in a sandbox if you have one, and ask Blackbaud support directly whether constituent-level alerts or notes can be set to display during daily sales or group sales check-in.
If the answer is no, or only partly, these approaches work in practice:
Route pay-on-arrival bookings through group sales
Group sales reservations are built to carry a balance due, deposits, and payment status. If most of your pay-on-arrival traffic is groups, taking those requests through a group inquiry form and creating the reservation in group sales gives staff a record that clearly shows what’s owed. That’s more reliable than trying to make a general admission order behave like an invoice.
Mark the constituent record
Use a constituent attribute or a note with a consistent label (for example, “Balance due at arrival”) so it stands out when staff look up the record. This only works if staff actually open the constituent record at check-in, so build that into the arrival routine.
Run a daily arrivals query
The most dependable “pop-up” is often a printed or on-screen list. Build a query of reservations for today with an outstanding balance, sort it by arrival time, and have the opening supervisor review it before doors open. A smart field or query column showing the balance makes the list self-explanatory.
Reconcile at close
At end of day, rerun the same query. Anything still showing a balance either didn’t show up or slipped through. Catching it the same day is much easier than chasing a school district a month later.
Consider whether you need pay-on-arrival online
Pay-on-arrival usually exists for a reason: schools that need a purchase order, groups whose final headcount changes, or patrons who don’t trust the online form. Each of those has a better answer than an unpaid order:
- Headcount uncertainty: take a deposit online and settle the difference on the day.
- Purchase orders and invoices: send a payment link once the paperwork clears, so the balance is paid before the visit.
- Checkout friction: if people choose “pay later” because the form is hard to use on a phone, fixing the form may remove most of the demand.
Every booking you convert to paid-in-advance is one fewer thing the desk has to catch.
Where Social Good can help
When the real issue is that guests abandon or avoid paying online, our Checkouts replace Altru web forms with a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and the transactions write back to Altru. It won’t create an arrival alert for you, but it can reduce how many orders arrive unpaid in the first place.
Quick answers
Can Altru online sales take a reservation with no payment?
It depends on how your forms and sales methods are set up. Group sales handles balances due more naturally than general admission web sales. Confirm with Blackbaud support before promising this option publicly.
What’s the simplest safeguard if we keep pay-on-arrival?
A daily query of today’s reservations with an outstanding balance, reviewed before opening and again at close.
