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Setting up shop for the first time! What would you do different?

Lydia Lingerfelt

Hi! I have been using Altru for selling tickets and memberships for a museum but now we are setting up a giftshop from scratch! I have been learning about the merchandise and have already had to go back and reconfigure our inventory a few different times as I learn more.

My question is: If you had the opportunity to go back-- What would be that one thing you would have done differently in the beginning? Or what do you wish you learned sooner that might not have been initially obvious to a beginner? (I'm worried about things that I may not have the ability to go back and change at a later date etc.)

Thanks for all your wisdom and support!

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Comments

Chris Nungesser

Hi @Lydia Lingerfelt!

We have made the decision to partner with Shopify for our merchandise. There are some limitations to Altru's merchandise tool that we couldn't work around. One big limitation is that there are not any webforms for merchandise. So no online shop. And it doesn't seem like Blackbaud is dedicating much energy toward building out merchandise (so this seems to be the way it's going to be). Along those lines, I believe that Blackbaud is working to partner with Shopify in the future. Some integration to allow the two system to work together.

Chris ?

Dianne Crosby

Hi Lydia,

There is a lot of information you will learn as you go along. But as far as initial "this might screw things up" issues - I would highlight the following.

"Name" and "Description"

My first big issue is when creating a new merchandise Item you see "Name" and "Description" as the first two fields. "Description" does not appear on the receipt or on the sales reports. So I don't use that field. In the "Name" field I add both the Vendor's Item Number and the Description, always using a colon separating the two. This way, when I export queries to excel I can easily separate the Item Number and the Description into two columns. You could use a dash instead, but I don't recommend it because dashes are commonly used in item numbers and descriptions. In excel, this will make it much harder to neatly divide the two.

Examples

EK2945: Owl Ornament
EA13536: Butterfly Ornament
1671: Lotus Earrings
2469: Birds Necklace

"Category"

If you change the "Name" later, the query/sales reports will reflect the new name. However, if you change the "Category" later, the query/sales reports will always reflect the category that was used at the time of the transaction. So be careful with that if you think you may want to change the category later. (I initially used the category feature in a way I later regretted...) I would assume this is also true of the "Department" but I haven't experimented with that.

"Dimensions"

I stopped using dimensions because when creating queries it sometimes gave inaccurate numbers for quantity on hand or quantity sold. It's been awhile, but I think it depended on which fields were included in the query. To avoid dealing with that, I now just create one item for every t-shirt size and color we sell.

"Last Received"

I like to know how long an item has been in the store - when it was last received. When you receive shipments in Altru, you can see the date it was received.

We had access to our old POS system for a year after we switched to Altru. At the end of that year I ran a query in Altru for all the items that I hadn't received a new shipment of during that year. I then went to our old POS system and looked those items up, to see when they were last received. In Altru, I looked up the item, clicked on the "Documentation" tab, and added a note of when it was last received. This was really helpful as time went on, knowing how long some items had been in the store.

That's all I can think of right now. But I'm happy to chat anytime!