Three weeks after a weekend rush, finance asks why Saturday’s cash came in forty dollars short. You go back into Altru to pull the drawer report for the register in question, and it isn’t where you left it. The drawer was closed, the deposit was made, and the report you printed (or meant to print) at close is now hard to get back.
This is one of the more frustrating gaps in Altru’s daily sales workflow, and it catches nearly every new finance or admissions manager at least once. Below is what’s actually going on, how to reconstruct what you need, and how to set up your close process so you aren’t reconstructing anything next time.
Why the drawer report seems to vanish
In Altru, closing a drawer and depositing it are two separate steps. While a drawer is closed but not yet deposited, it sits in a reconciliation state where you can review it and run its report. Once the drawer’s payments are pulled into a deposit, Altru treats that drawer’s work as finished, and the drawer-level view you used at close is generally no longer offered the same way.
The payments themselves aren’t gone. Every transaction is still on its constituent or sales record, in revenue, and in the deposit. What you lose is the convenient one-page summary organized by drawer and user, with counted totals next to expected totals.
Behavior can differ depending on your Altru configuration and security roles, and Blackbaud does adjust this area from time to time. If you’re not sure how your instance behaves, close and deposit a test drawer in a sandbox (or with a small test transaction you void afterward) and see exactly what remains visible. If your organization can’t find a way back to a deposited drawer’s report, ask Blackbaud support to confirm whether one exists for your version before building workarounds.
Getting the information back after the fact
You usually don’t need the original report itself. You need the numbers it showed. A few ways to rebuild them:
Start from the deposit
The deposit record shows which payments were included and their totals by payment method. If each drawer goes into its own deposit, this alone may answer the question. If several drawers were combined into one deposit, you’ll need to split them out using one of the options below.
Build a payment query
A revenue or payment query filtered to the date, the user who took the payments, and payment method gets you very close to the drawer’s expected totals. Useful output fields include transaction date, amount, payment method, the user who entered it, and the program or sales channel. Save the query so the next lookup takes a minute instead of an hour.
One limit to be honest about: a query shows what Altru recorded, not what staff physically counted. If the question is “was the counted cash different from the expected cash,” the counted figure lives on the drawer close, and once that’s out of reach your best source may be whatever paper count sheet or close log your team kept.
Check the standard daily sales reports
Altru’s built-in sales and revenue reports can be run for past date ranges. They won’t line up drawer-by-drawer in every case, but they’re often enough to confirm totals by payment type for a given day and to spot whether a discrepancy is real or a timing issue (for example, a refund processed the next morning).
Fix it at close, not three weeks later
The reliable answer is to capture the drawer report before the deposit step, every time. A close routine that works for most front-of-house teams:
- Close the drawer and run its report before anyone touches deposits. Make this a hard rule, not a habit.
- Save the report as a PDF to a shared folder with a consistent name, such as date, register, and staff initials. A printout in a binder is fine too, but a file is searchable.
- Record the physical count separately on a count sheet or simple spreadsheet, signed by the person who counted and the person who verified.
- Note any variance and its explanation on the same day, while people still remember the voided sale or the twenty that got handed back as change.
- Only then create the deposit. If a drawer has an unresolved variance, hold that drawer out of the deposit until a manager reviews it.
It also helps to keep drawers and deposits roughly one-to-one where your finance team allows it. A deposit per drawer, or per register per day, makes the deposit record itself a usable stand-in for the drawer report later.
Who should own this
The gap usually lives between two teams: admissions closes drawers, finance makes deposits. Decide who is responsible for saving the drawer report, and write it into both teams’ checklists. When nobody owns it, it gets skipped on exactly the days you’ll later need it.
Quick answers
Can I reverse a deposit to see the drawer again?
Possibly, depending on your permissions and whether the deposit has been posted to your general ledger. Reversing a posted deposit has accounting consequences, so treat it as a last resort and talk to finance and Blackbaud support first.
Is the transaction data lost after deposit?
No. Individual payments remain in Altru and can be found through queries, revenue records, and the deposit. Only the drawer-level summary becomes harder to reach.
What’s the fastest fix for this week?
Save a payment query filtered by date and user, and add “save drawer report as PDF” to your close checklist before the deposit step.
