Grant tracking involves two different jobs, and Altru only does one of them well. The first job is recording the money: who awarded it, how much, when it arrives, and what it is restricted to. The second is managing the grant itself: application deadlines, interim reports, renewal cycles, and program outcomes. Altru handles the money as ordinary revenue on a constituent record. The lifecycle work needs a little structure that you build yourself.
Below is a setup that keeps grant dollars clean in Altru, gives your finance team reports they can trust, and keeps deadlines from living only in one person’s inbox.
First, decide what a “grant” means in your data
Before you touch any configuration, agree with finance on a few answers:
- Which funders count as grants? Foundations and government agencies, almost certainly. Corporate sponsorships and family foundation gifts that behave like major gifts are where teams disagree. Settle it once.
- Restricted or unrestricted? Finance needs to see restricted grant money separately, by purpose, so it can be released as it is spent.
- Award date or payment date? Multi-year awards are often booked in full when awarded and then paid over time. Your Altru entries should mirror how the auditors see it.
Everything else follows from those three answers. Skipping this step is a frequent reason grant reports in Altru drift away from the general ledger.
Recording grant revenue
Put the funder on an organization record
Create each foundation or agency as an organization constituent, not as an individual. Link the program officer or contact person to that organization as a relationship. When the program officer changes jobs, you update the relationship and keep the giving history on the organization where it belongs.
Use pledges for multi-year or installment awards
A three-year award paid annually generally fits as a pledge with an installment schedule (confirm in a test record that your pledge setup matches how finance books multi-year awards). Each payment that arrives is applied to the pledge, and the outstanding balance stays visible on the funder’s record. A one-time grant paid in full can be entered as a regular donation.
Separate grants with revenue categories and designations
Two fields do most of the work here:
- Revenue category answers “what kind of money is this?” A dedicated category such as “Grants” (or “Foundation Grants” and “Government Grants” if finance wants the split) lets you pull every grant dollar with one query filter.
- Designation answers “what is it for?” Restricted grants should go to a designation tied to the restricted purpose, such as an education program or a capital project, so finance can see what is available to spend.
Keep the two roles distinct. If you start creating designations named after individual funders, you will end up with dozens of designations that nobody can roll up cleanly.
Optional: an appeal or campaign for grant seeking
Some organizations attach grant revenue to a dedicated appeal or campaign so fundraising reports separate institutional giving from annual fund and membership. Do this only if someone actually reads those reports. It adds a field staff must fill in correctly on every entry.
Tracking the grant lifecycle
Altru is built around admissions, membership, and fundraising revenue. It is not a grants management system, and you should not expect it to send you reminders for an interim report due in six months. As far as we know there is no dedicated grant application or proposal module in Altru. If you are not sure what your instance includes, ask Blackbaud support before you build workarounds.
Practical options, from lightest to heaviest:
- Notes and attributes on the funder record. Add a note with the award letter terms and reporting schedule. If your Altru setup supports constituent attributes, an attribute for “grant status” (prospect, applied, awarded, declined, closed) makes funders queryable by stage.
- A shared grants calendar or tracker. A spreadsheet with one row per grant: funder, the funder’s Altru lookup ID, amount, award date, report due dates, renewal date, and owner. Using the lookup ID keeps the tracker tied to the right Altru record even when names are spelled differently.
- Dedicated grants software. If you manage dozens of active grants with complex reporting, a purpose-built tool is worth the cost. Keep Altru as the place the revenue is recorded, and use the grants tool for applications and compliance.
Whichever you choose, give each grant a named owner. Missed report deadlines are almost never a software problem. They happen because nobody was clearly responsible.
Reporting on grants
Once revenue category and designation are used consistently, a revenue query filtered on the grant category gives you most of what you need. Useful outputs to save:
- Grant revenue received this fiscal year, by designation.
- Open grant pledges with remaining balances and next installment dates.
- Funders who gave last year but have no revenue this year, for renewal planning.
Reconcile those totals against finance each month, not once a year at audit time. A small mismatch caught the month it happens is usually quick to trace. The same mismatch found during the audit, months later, is much harder to untangle.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Entering a grant on the program officer’s individual record instead of the foundation’s.
- Booking a multi-year award as several unrelated donations, which hides the outstanding balance.
- Using a generic “Donation” revenue category for grants, then trying to separate them later by hand.
- Creating new designations for every funder instead of for every restricted purpose.
Quick answers
Can Altru track grant applications that haven’t been awarded yet?
Not in a dedicated way that we know of. Notes, attributes, or an outside tracker linked by lookup ID are the usual approaches.
Should in-kind grants go into Altru?
Only if finance wants them reported with your other revenue. Ask how they are booked in the general ledger and match that treatment.
