Your fall festival has forty craft booths, six food trucks, and a beer garden run by a local brewery. Every one of them owes you a fee, and finance wants that money in Altru, not on a clipboard and a separate card reader. Setting the vendors up as an event is a common answer. It can work well, but only if you build it with a few decisions made up front.
One clarification first, because “vendor payments” can mean two opposite things.
Money coming in vs. money going out
Collecting fees from vendors (booth rentals, food truck spots, market stall fees, sponsor tables) is incoming revenue. Altru can record that, and events are one reasonable way to do it.
Paying your own suppliers (the tent rental company, the caterer, the band) is accounts payable. Altru is not built to be an AP system. Those bills belong in your accounting software. If someone on your team is trying to use Altru events to track what you owe suppliers, steer them back to finance. The rest of this article covers the first case.
Why an event fits vendor fees
An Altru event already gives you most of what a vendor program needs:
- Registration options that can stand in for booth types: a standard 10×10 booth, a corner booth, a food truck spot, a nonprofit table at a reduced rate.
- Capacity, so you can’t sell more spaces than the site plan allows.
- A registrant list tied to constituent records, so each vendor’s payment history lives in one place year after year.
- Revenue that posts like other event revenue, which means it flows through your normal batches and deposits.
The alternative, recording each fee as a one-off payment with no event, works for a handful of vendors. Past that, you lose the roster, the capacity check, and the easy year-over-year comparison.
How to set it up
1. Make vendors their own event
Don’t add booth options to the same event your attendees register for. Create a separate event, named so it sorts clearly in lists and reports (for example, “Fall Festival 2026 – Vendors”). Attendee counts stay clean, and you can pull vendor revenue without filtering out ticket buyers.
2. Decide who the registrant is
Most vendors are businesses, but the person filling out the form is an individual. Decide whether you want the payment tied to an organization record, an individual record, or both, and test how your event registration handles an organization as the registrant before opening registration. If you’re unsure what your configuration allows, try it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support. Whatever you choose, be consistent, or next year’s vendor list will be half businesses and half the owners’ personal records.
3. Get the revenue category right
Booth fees are earned income, not gifts. Talk to finance about which revenue account they expect, and confirm the event’s price and any benefit or deductible amounts are set so a vendor isn’t issued a donation acknowledgment for renting a booth. Run one test transaction and check where it lands in your general ledger mapping before real money moves.
4. Tag vendor records
Add a constituency, attribute, or similar code that marks a record as a vendor. Two reasons: you can build a query of every vendor you’ve ever worked with, and you can exclude vendors from donor appeals and member mailings. A food truck owner who gets a year-end giving letter for their spot fee is not a great look.
5. Plan for applications before payment
This is where events fit least well. Many festivals and markets are juried: vendors apply, you approve a mix of categories, and only then do they pay. Public event registration is usually first come, first served. Common workarounds:
- Collect applications outside Altru (a simple form tool), then register approved vendors yourself and take payment by phone or at the office.
- Keep the vendor registration form unpublished and share it only with approved vendors.
- Use registration options with capacities that match how many of each category you’ll accept, so a sudden wave of jewelry makers can’t take every booth.
Cancellations, deposits, and balances
Decide your refund policy before the first payment, and write down how staff should process a vendor cancellation in Altru so revenue and registrant counts both reverse correctly. If you take deposits with a balance due later, confirm how your Altru setup handles partial payment on event registrations before you promise vendors a payment plan. Some organizations find it simpler to charge in full and refund, or to price the deposit and the balance as two separate registration options. Test whichever approach you pick with a fake vendor from start to finish.
Reporting after the event
Because vendors have their own event, the after-action numbers are straightforward: total booth revenue, count by registration option, and which vendors came back from last year. Build a constituent query on your vendor tag joined to event registrations, save it, and next year’s outreach list is already done.
Quick answers
Can I use group sales instead of events for vendors?
Group sales is built around booking visits and admission for groups, not renting space. It’s usually a worse fit than an event for booth fees.
Will vendor fees inflate my event attendance?
Only if they’re registered on the attendee event. Keeping vendors in a separate event avoids that.
Can Altru pay the vendors we hire?
No. Outgoing payments to suppliers belong in your accounting system.
