Taking Deposits for Summer Camps

Melanie Read
Melanie Read
Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions
Given the ever changing nature of Coronovirus, we are considering taking deposits for our in-person Summer camps this year. As a pre-registered program, there is is no way for Altru to do this. I am wondering if anyone has had any success with Work Arounds? I had one idea to basically make two separate programs for each camp. One would be the initial registration and a deposit price type. Then, when it was time to pay the full amount, we would send them a private link to another pre-reg program (not advertised on our web) that would have the remaining balance. The biggest Con I can see with this would be that we would have to do a lot of manual matching up and monitoring.

Has anyone done something similar? Or is there another work around out there?

Comments

  • Melissa Gard
    Melissa Gard
    Seventh Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
    Do you use Online Express to build forms and process payments?

    That's what I use and I might have some suggestions if you do.
  • Melanie Read
    Melanie Read
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
    Melissa, thanks for responding. I've never heard of Online Express but it looks like it's another Blackbaud product! I suspect it's outside our budget currently. But does it help with deposits?
  • Melissa Wersinger
    Melissa Wersinger
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
    Hi Melanie,

    I'm not sure how many people you anticipate with camp but I have been able to take partial payments through advanced sales. This would require you to take the registration information and place it into the system manually which could take some time to do if you have a lot of people that are doing deposits. You could also take registration information and have them enrolled but not take payment at all and apply the payment later. I hope that makes sense! Thanks,
  • Breanne Leach
    Breanne Leach
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    We don't take deposits for camp, but we'll do partial refunds/full refunds depending on the situation (last year obviously resulted in all camps being fully refunded). There are some potential issues with partial refunds if you will need to later refund more, but if your deposits are full refundable if camp doesn't move forward I'd think taking full payment now could also be an option for you.


    The partial payments in Advance Sales that Melissa mentioned could also be an option for you, but it does require someone to take each sale in person/over the phone and eliminates the online purchase option.
  • Melanie Read
    Melanie Read
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
    Melissa,


    I would love to hear more about how you do this. Are your camps set up as Preregistered Events? If so, I don't think I know how to do a partial payment for a Prereg event. You said you do it through Advance Sales?
  • Melanie Read
    Melanie Read
    Ninth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge
    Thanks Breanne,

    Yes, we considered doing that, but decided that doesn't address our thought that people might be unwilling or unable to pay a large sum at one time for a camp. It sounds like you are familiar with partial payment through Advance Sales as well. Can that be done with a Preregistered event?! I had no idea!
  • Breanne Leach
    Breanne Leach
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi Melanie,


    Yes, we don't use it because it doesn't look pretty (and I'm not sure how it looks to Accounting from a "closed drawer" perspective), but it is possible. You'd set up the order and then click pay on arrival. Then, you'd go back in and process the partial payment (at that point you can't click pay on arrival OR complete, but you'll see the amount paid on the order in the reserved sales order on the person's record). You could hop in a chat with BB to ask them to test it all the way through for you so you could see what a closed drawer/accounting report would look like if you didn't want to test in your own system.


    You could also do a regular "pay on arrival" sale in Advance sales and skip deposits. I think it still comes back to whether those deposits are refundable.


    Another potential option (but still requires a person/phone sale) would be to sell your deposit as merchandise and then just reduce the price of camp accordingly. You could do a refund to exchange and then purchase with exchange if you wanted all the money specifically on the program later, but I personally wouldn't do that knowing the intricacies of how poorly Altru handles refunds.

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