You pull a revenue export for the board report, spot-check it against a gift you know was soft credited to a trustee, and the soft credit is there. You check the next one and it isn’t. Same query, same date range, different result. It looks random, but it almost never is.
Soft credits behave differently from the gift fields around them, and most “sometimes” exports come down to one of a handful of causes. The fastest way through is to figure out which pattern you’re looking at before you start rebuilding queries.
Start by sorting the misses
Take five or six gifts where the soft credit showed up and five or six where it didn’t. Open each one in Altru and confirm a soft credit actually exists on the record. Then look for what the missing ones have in common:
- Were they entered a different way (web form, daily sales, a batch, a staff-entered payment)?
- Are they a different revenue type, such as membership payments versus straight donations?
- Was the soft credit added later, after the gift was first recorded?
- Do they have more than one soft credit?
- Is the person receiving the soft credit someone your query filters would exclude?
One of those usually jumps out. Here’s what each one tends to mean.
The common causes
The soft credit was never on the record
Soft credits are usually added by a person, not by the transaction itself. Gifts that come in through web forms or quick front-desk payments often arrive without one, and someone has to go back and add it. If your missing rows cluster around one entry channel, the export is likely accurate and the gap is in the data entry process. No query change will fix that.
Your filters are on the wrong side of the relationship
A soft credit links two constituents: the one who paid and the one being recognized. If your query filters on the paying constituent (for example, “constituent is in the Board selection”), you’ll only see soft credits where the payer happens to meet that filter. A gift from a family foundation soft credited to a trustee won’t appear, because the foundation isn’t on the board. Decide whose perspective the export is from and put the filter on that constituent.
A filter on a soft credit field quietly drops rows
The reverse problem is also common. When you add a criterion that uses a field from the soft credit area of the query (soft credit amount greater than zero, for instance), revenue without a soft credit drops out entirely. That’s sometimes what you want, but if the same query is also supposed to list ordinary gifts, the results will look inconsistent depending on which gifts you were expecting.
Multiple soft credits create extra rows, and someone removes them
Revenue to soft credits is a one-to-many relationship. A gift soft credited to two spouses can produce two rows in the output. When that export goes to a spreadsheet and someone removes “duplicates” by gift ID, one of the soft credits disappears. Check whether the raw query output and the cleaned spreadsheet actually disagree before blaming Altru.
The credit lives somewhere other than where you’re looking
Depending on how a payment was applied, recognition information may be tied to the revenue as a whole or to a specific application of it, and Altru’s query field browser can surface related credit or recognition fields in more than one place. If one group of gifts (often memberships paid as gifts, or split payments) never shows a soft credit, browse the query fields for every area that mentions soft credits or recognition and test each one against a known record. If you can’t tell which one your organization uses, Blackbaud support can confirm for your version.
Timing and static selections
If a soft credit was added after an export ran, or the export is built from a static selection created weeks ago, recent changes won’t show up. Rerun against a dynamic selection, or no selection, and compare.
Build a test query you can trust
Before fixing the main export, make a small diagnostic query:
- Create a revenue query limited to a short date range.
- Add the revenue ID, date, amount, payer name, and every soft credit field you can find: recipient name, recipient lookup ID, and amount.
- Add no filters on the soft credit fields.
- Run it and compare against the gifts you checked by hand.
If the test query shows every soft credit you expect, the problem is in your original query’s filters or in what happens to the file after export. If the test query also misses them, the issue is either data entry or the field area you picked. Once you know which, add your real filters back one at a time and rerun after each. The filter that makes rows disappear is your culprit.
Keep it from coming back
- Write down which query is the official soft credit report and who maintains it. Copies of copies are where inconsistencies breed.
- Agree on a data entry rule for adding soft credits to gifts that arrive online, and check it with a simple query of recent web gifts from households or foundations.
- Tell spreadsheet users that one gift can legitimately appear on more than one row.
Where Social Good fits
Most of this is query design and data entry habits, and you can fix it inside Altru. If the export ends up in a spreadsheet or another tool every month, Data Bridge can sync the results of a corrected Altru query to Google Sheets and other tools, so people work from the same query output each time instead of a hand-edited file.
Quick answers
Why does the same gift appear twice in my soft credit export?
Usually because it has more than one soft credit. Each one can produce its own row. That’s expected, so don’t remove the duplicates without checking.
Can Altru add soft credits automatically to web gifts?
We wouldn’t assume it can. Test a donation through your web form in a sandbox or on a test record and see what lands on the revenue. If nothing is added, plan for a manual follow-up step.
