Altru 3.1 New Feature: A Meeting of the Minds, err ... Transactions

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Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. – Aristotle.

Maybe he said it best, but I doubt he was philosophizing about credit card reconciliation. If you do, drop us a line because we just got done with a marathon session and we can share some insights about matching transactions. In the next update for Altru, we’ve taken a fresh look at the reconciliation process and how we present these concepts in the application. If you are unfamiliar with the previous version this treasury feature, you can get a quick overview in this previous blog.

We've come a long way since then, driven primarily by customer feedback, watching and listening to how you use it and our desire to add maximum value to our customers using BBMS. We really wanted to make Altru and BBMS friends; here are some thought provoking changes that really bring them together.

bbms

We wanted to make Altru friendlier for you too and fit your language so that it’s more understandable at first sight. So, we dropped the words settlement report in exchange for disbursement report, which is after all, what we call it.

One other helpful change, when researching transactions, is the ability to drill back from the Altru transactions page to their respective pages. This is a welcome addition to the transaction list, making it that much easier to examine the specifics without doing a search.

Since I've mentioned the “Altru transactions page,” it’s probably most apparent that we’ve put some nice personable buttons in place to help you navigate. My experience helping customers use the old version definitely began by explaining what they are seeing on the screen. Now, instead of working on one page that has everything, you can now approach the reconciliation process from either side that you desire, by Altru’s transaction list, or that of the payment processor’s report. Pulling the unmatched disbursements into its own space is going to make the process faster and less cluttered, since there is one (hopefully small) list of items that need attention.

As a side note, we want west coast friends too. Those in non-eastern time zones might have seen unmatched transaction for items that happened during the 10PM-12AM window; we patched that up so they’ll still get matched. We <3 you guys!

The improvements that I've mentioned above are just the basic changes to the area, but we took it to the next level with the automatic integration with BBMS. Because Blackbaud provides both of these systems, we can give a little more depth to the experience. The outcome? Well, we are hoping that for the daily functions you won’t even have to open BBMS anymore.

The most common reasons why we saw people going back to BBMS is to download the disbursement report, so now you can pop the disbursement open with a single click.

We’d also run into the situation where an inauspicious transaction in BBMS wouldn't match something in Altru. Come to find out that it was a charge-back or refund transaction not coming from Altru. Now you can manage charge-backs, charge-back refunds, and suspect transactions right from Altru, plus there are pleasant little icons next to these specific items so you won’t have to dig around to find them.

Philosophers like Aristotle and his buddies had to rely on word of mouth to convey detailed concepts to their friends, but we’ve got YouTube (eat your heart out Guttenberg.) Give our demo video a watch to see it in action.

For an overview of all of the new features coming to Altru we recommend that you visit our new features page.  Did you miss the last release info?  Don’t worry; you can review all of the other exciting changes we’ve rolled out earlier this year at the bottom of that page.

 

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