Preparing Your Shared Users For Single Sign-On

By now, you’ve probably heard about the new Single Sign On feature coming to Altru in October.  If you want to know more about Single Sign On, you can read all of our communications here. Because of these important changes, your part time and seasonal staff who share Altru logins may be impacted by this change and how they log in to Altru.  With these changes, now is a good time to review your set up and how these changes will impact shared users and End of Day Reconciliation.

If you or anyone else at your organization accesses Altru via a shared login (like RegisterA1234 or FrontDeskA6789 instead of JLewis1234), you will need to do one of the following:
 
As a Best Practice, we recommend that you use this as an opportunity to create separate logins for your users.
·         If you plan to create separate accounts for everyone, read below to learn more about how these changes can impact your end of day procedures.
·         We do not recommend sharing one login credential for multiple users, as it is a security concern and makes it difficult to track who's doing what work in the program. If at all possible, evaluate your current processes to determine if you are able to move forward with separate logins for your users.

If creating separate logins for volunteers, part time staff, and ticket sellers is not possible, then we recommend that you create a new email address to link to the shared user (or use an existing email address if one already exists) and set up an account for it on Blackbaud.com.
·         While we don't recommend this option for security reasons, if you plan to continue using a shared login, this user will need to be linked to a Blackbaud.com login after the update.
·         If you have multiple shared logins (like RegisterA, RegisterB, etc.), you'll need a unique email address for each. Please note that the email address must be a valid one, as you'll need to click on a confirmation link included in the Blackbaud.com invitation email. So whether it's RegisterA1234@YourMuseum.org or RegisterA1234@gmail.com, just make sure you can access the invitation email when setting up the user on Blackbaud.com.
 
In the past, if your ticket sellers shared a login, but will now have their own unique Altru logins, there may be some changes to your sales associates daily routine.  When ticket sellers share one login, the drawer is only opened and closed once during the day.  When each person has their own login, each user must open their own drawer at the beginning of their shift, then close and count the cash for their own drawer.  You should plan to have either a physical cash drawer or a bank bag for each associate to use when they are opening/closing their drawer each day.  I recommend bank bags because they take up less space and can be easily stored in a safe when the cash is not being used for the sales drawer.  Click here to watch an overview of a Ticket Seller’s Daily Routine in Altru, including how to open and close a drawer.

Each sales associate should plan to run the Close Drawer Report for their sales activity that day and put it with the cash at the end of each day.

At the end of the day, a supervisor responsible for approving drawers will have a drawer for each seller that day that must be approved.  Here is an example of what it looks like when you have multiple users with their own drawers:


As always, Blackbaud recommends approving all drawers at the end of the day or the following business day because only approved drawers will appear on the Deposit Report.  The Deposit Report is critical to any Financial Reconciliation Process.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to Altru Announcements to stay up-to-date on all things SSO.  We will post additional announcements, blogs, and more as we closer to the October release of Single Sign-On.