How-to
Using Control Totals for Merchandise Batches in Altru
A control total is the oldest trick in bookkeeping: before you key a stack of transactions, you write down what the stack should add up to. When you finish, the system’s total either matches your number or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you find the mistake before anything posts to the general ledger, not three
How to Manage Gift Shop Merchandise Inventory in Altru
Gift shop inventory tends to drift without anyone noticing. A box of plush toys gets sold before anyone receives it in Altru. A cracked mug goes in the trash but stays in the count. By the year-end count, the on-hand numbers and the shelves don’t match, and nobody can say exactly when they stopped matching.
How to Track Non-Merchandise Service Vendors in Altru
The caterer for your spring gala, the bus company that brings in school groups, the AV crew for the members’ lecture series, the pest control contractor. None of them sell you anything you’ll put on a shelf, but every one of them is a business you deal with all year. Sooner or later someone asks
How to Account for Gifted Merchandise in Altru
A tote bag goes to a visiting speaker. A box of plush animals goes to the education team for a school program. The development director grabs three signed books as thank-you gifts for major donors. None of it was sold, but all of it left the shelf, and at month end someone in finance asks
Lost or Stolen Card Payments in a Locked Altru Deposit: How to Fix It
A credit card payment that looked fine at the register turns out to be bad. The card was reported lost or stolen, the charge was disputed, or the transaction never actually settled with your processor. By the time anyone notices, the payment is already sitting in a bank deposit in Altru, and that deposit is
How to Handle Refunded Gifts in Altru Without Breaking Your Books
A donor calls two weeks after a year-end gift: they meant to give $250, not $2,500, and they want the difference back. Or a family foundation’s check bounces. Or a card gift turns into a chargeback. The money question is quick. Getting Altru to tell the truth afterward takes longer, because a refunded gift touches
How to Refund a Pledge Payment in Altru Without Breaking the Pledge
A donor makes a pledge payment twice by mistake, or a board member’s assistant charges the wrong card, or a family asks for money back after a hardship. Whatever the reason, refunding a pledge payment in Altru is less straightforward than refunding a ticket order. The difference comes from what a pledge payment is. It’s
Why Altru Won’t Process a Refund (and How to Find the Cause)
A refund that won’t go through is rarely random. When Altru refuses one, or appears to process it but the money never reaches the guest’s card, the cause almost always falls into one of a handful of buckets: the state of the original payment, where that payment was actually processed, what has already happened to
How to Refund Online Sales in Altru Without Breaking Reconciliation
A visitor buys four timed tickets online for Saturday, then emails Monday morning: one child is sick, can they get their money back? Refunding that order should take two minutes. In practice it often turns into a question of who touches what: the admissions lead in Altru, the finance office in the payment processor, or
Sharing One Cash Drawer Across Multiple Altru Workstations
Two registers, one cash drawer. It sounds like it should be a settings change, but the answer has less to do with Altru than with how the drawer itself gets told to open. Once you understand that piece, the options get much clearer, and so do the tradeoffs for cash accountability. The short answer Altru
