New to Altru

Greg Bryson · January 2020

We have a rather large retail presence throughout the state at multiple locations within our institution. Is anyone out there using Altru for merchandise with several locations? If so what has your experience been. We are moving to Altru and have some concerns about how it will work since we have several locations.

Erica Montgomery · January 2020

I'm new as well and would like to know about this! Details would be greatly appreciated!

Dianne Crosby · January 2020

Altru is not designed to handle multiple locations.

Beyond that, Altru is limited in what it can do with its merchandise module. From the cashier's point of view - the most frustrating things are the inability to do an exchange (instead you have to process two transactions - one for a return, and another for the new item), and the lack of gift card support.

The limitations affect the store manager the most. The reporting is abysmal, as is the process of ordering, receiving, printing labels, and performing inventory counts.

In general, I think Altru is fine for a small store with few reporting needs. The larger you get, and the more you need to analyze your data, the more I would suggest staying away from Altru for your store.

David Daum · January 2020

Very helpful, thank you.

Greg Bryson · January 2020

Thank you Dianne

We are in the process of testing to see how it works and how to configure to best suit our needs. Hopefully this will fulfill our needs but we will see. Thank you again for your feedback.

Question if you see this - can you make the Department the location? And break reporting down that way from a sales and inventory perspective?

Dianne Crosby · January 2020

Let's say you have 12 stores. You would have to create 12 versions of the same item (and the name of the item has to be unique). For example, if you have a butterfly shirt sold at all 12 locations, you would end up with this:

Department - Category - Item - SKU

Store One - Apparel - Butterfly Shirt, One - SKU010011111

Store Two - Apparel - Butterfly Shirt, Two - SKU010011112

Store Three - Apparel - Butterfly Shirt, Three - SKU010011113

Etc...

You could also approach it by making the location the "Category", but it would essentially be the same issue:

Department - Category - Item - SKU

Apparel - Store One - Butterfly Shirt, One - SKU010011111

Apparel - Store Two - Butterfly Shirt, Two - SKU010011112

Apparel - Store Three - Butterfly Shirt, Three - SKU010011113

Etc...

(However, there might be some advantages of one over the other when running sales reports. I'd have to play around with that a bit to see if there is a difference between the two scenarios.)

Altu's "canned reports" are extremely limited. So the majority of the time I use "queries" to create reports. Queries are not custom reports - but they do provide raw data that can be exported to excel. Then, within excel I apply formulas to that raw data in order to create a report.

I think you *might* be able to make this work. Your reports would have 12 items for each butterfly shirt. So if you have 2,000 items you would end up with 24,000 SKU's. However, as long as you are consistent in creating your items in Altru, when you export your queries to excel you should be able to group those 12 SKU's together to determine the total numbers per item.

I would highly recommend everyone who is involved in this take some advanced excel classes to prepare you for how to create your "query to excel" reports. It will be a lot of trial and error figuring out how to use excel to replicate what you are accustomed to your POS system doing for you.

Dianne Crosby · January 2020

If you are considering using a Counterpoint/Altru combination, here's some information I received in 2017 (so it may have changed since then) regarding the integration:

I asked this question:
I’m not sure exactly what the Counterpoint/Altru integration would look like, what is integrated and what remains separate? In particular, I’m wondering how this works from our cashier’s point of view.

Currently, our cashiers sell admission tickets, program tickets, memberships, and merchandise all from the same station. I’m trying to imagine how the integration works, and I assume the cashiers would sell merchandise from Counterpoint and sell tickets/memberships from Altru? So, if a customer wanted to purchase a water and an admission ticket that would require two transactions? And the cashier would need to have two cash drawers to keep the money separate in? At the end of the day, they would close out two drawers – one for Counterpoint and one for Altru? Is that correct, or does the integration somehow eliminate this?

And I received this answer:
You’ve got it pretty close in your write up. The main functions of the integration are:

·         Sync Constituent/Customer data between Counterpoint and Altru, including Membership information.
·         Allow for Membership sales and donations to be made in Counterpoint and transfer to Altru through a batch process.
·         Send Sales Transaction History from Counterpoint to Altru as Document Notes (not merchandise transactions). This is purely informational in Altru – very useful for building mailing lists / queries, but does not touch the merchandise sales in Altru.

Admissions, events, groups, etc would be sold through Altru. Anything that you are using Counterpoint to track inventory on would go through Counterpoint. It is possible have stations that run both Counterpoint and Altru, but you are correct that you would need two cash drawers. Generally, we recommend keeping stations either only CP or only Altru. For small items (water, using your example below), you may elect to sell through Altru to keep the transaction simple for your customers, then just do an inventory adjustment in Counterpoint later.

The integration allows you to upsell memberships and donations in Counterpoint, reducing the need for two transactions if your customer wants to buy a t-shirt and a membership.

Patti Hitzler · January 2020

We had been using CounterPoint in the past, switched to Altu in spring of 2016. Here was my list of immediate issues at the time, none of which have been addressed or corrected. The ONLY thing I like better about it is the breakdown from department to also include categories. Doing physical inventory has gone from one day to four. We had to buy a second program to print labels because Altru's are 1x2" which are too big for virtually all items in the shop. I am very small, 470 square feet, and I find it very frustrating and time consuming, a bigger store would be a nightmare. Diane Crosby is the saving grace to the whole thing, she is a expert and better than any help I've gotten from the company. If the decision hasn't been made yet, I would step back and reconsider.

ISSUES WITH ALTRU

Tickets are WAY to big --- Rosita said that is just how they are
Doesn’t tally the number of items sold each day --- Rosita said no one asks for this
Can’t do an inventory view by past date, only ‘today’. I did this often with CP to determine what should be ordered for upcoming season/events. Example being, what was my inventory going into GOL. --- Rosita said there is no way to do this
Cannot refund an item without a receipt. We have to have a ticket number, a person’s name, or date to do a search. If someone gets something for a gift, without any of these there is no way to refund them. Did a Chat, was told it can’t be done.
Can’t name more than one item the same name, example birthday card. I have them as birthday card 1, birthday card 2 etc.
No way to track gift certificates sold or redeemed.
Can’t do a merchandise search of more than 100 items without doing a separate query search
Can’t correct a cost/retail price mistake after the sale. If a cost was entered wrong at receiving, it will forever be wrong in the records if not caught before it sells.
Can’t see when a specific item sold. Item history shows receiving, physical count, adjustments, but not sales.

Dianne Crosby · January 2020

Ahh, thanks Patti! For those of you who are new, there used to be more of us here talking about merchandise. But most of them have disappeared. I can only assume their organizations allowed them to upgrade to a different POS system.

Re: bullet-point # 2 - I actually did ask for this! I had been submitting ideas for big changes in merchandise, none of which were implemented. So I wondered what would happen if I suggested something that should be easy to implement. So I created this idea:
https://altru.ideas.aha.io/ideas/ALTRU-I-177

Okay, so it only got 6 votes. But it would have been easy to add and would have given me an indication that larger merchandise improvements might come in the future. But here we are, four years later, and no improvements have been made in the merchandise module during that time. Yet, somehow I still keep hoping...

Oh, and for bullet-point #4 - I did figure out a query that will identify all the orders where that item was purchased. Which sometimes helps find the original order. But if that item sells frequently it is still hard to identify the exact order number...

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