Altru 2.92: The Credit Card Dust Has Settled

Our upcoming version of Altru will feature an automatic credit card reconciliation tool.  Wow, I’m very excited to say that.  Many of the customers that I’ve talked to are either experiencing minor difficulty with reconciliation of credit card transactions, or it’s one of the most frustrating processes they have today.

After talking to many you, we learned that matching the disbursement and transaction reports coming from your card processor to the information in Altru was difficult for some common reasons.

Timing is a huge source of headaches, the handling of cash from any given day is rarely happening on the same schedule as the credit cards that were processed on the same day. Also, the reports that your processor provides may contain too much information, or the report you want to match up in Altru doesn’t contain enough detail pertaining to credit card transactions to match them up tightly.  Oh yeah, who wants to match reports up manually anyway?  On top of this, once you’ve gotten through this task none of this reconciliation work is being captured in any of the systems involved.

We’ve decided to build some features specifically to address these concerns directly into Altru and they speak for themselves!  Here is what we have in store for 2.92:

• Upload the credit card report that you get from your processor
• Tell Altru how to read that file (Blackbaud Merchant Services is pre-loaded if you use BBMS)
• Altru will automatically match the transactions in Altru with those in your report
• Visually manage each report and relevant transactions by date range
• A spiffy report is provided to show you the status of credit card transactions to help you see what is outstanding
• The uploaded reports and matched transactions are stored securely in your database for future review

If you are the person matching credit card disbursement reports to payment transactions I hope that you are as excited about this improvement as I am!  We will be highlighting improvements to other areas of the software but this one is an all-new feature that has never been provided in a Blackbaud product before, so it’s a great way to send the Q4 release off with a bang!

Coming up tomorrow – - Altru 2.92: Closing the GAAP between Deposits and General Ledger.