Altru Ideas

Free services provided by your business should NEVER be reported in your books as a "discount", nor should they ever be reported as an "expense". Doing either is an IRS auditor's wet dream. However, if you want to simply track the value of your giveaways, keep reading, there is a simple solution. Reporting free services as expenses or discounts would illegally reduce net income (net taxable income). That would be great if you could get away with it, but under audit you'd lose. If you give away free goods, or if free goods or incidental items are included as part of a free service, you'd expense the goods at cost or LCM (and reduce your inventory accordingly), but, again, there would be no expense for the actual service - never, ever. To track service giveaways, create a liability account called, for example, "Free Passes Given" and a Contra Liability account called "Free Pass Redeemed". You can name the accounts anything that you like, but you must ensure that both are categorized as liability accounts. When you provide a free service or give away free passes or i.o.u.'s for free services, you would credit the liability account for the standard $ amount that you would have charged for each service unit, or for the service unit value of each free pass that you give away. Example: A skating rink sponsors skating races and gives away a total of 20 free passes to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishers. Normally the rink would charge a $3 entry fee per person. To account for the free passes when given away you would credit $60 (3 x 20) to the liability account "Free Passes Given". At a later date, when a person redeems a free pass, you'd debit $3/pass to the contra liability account "Free Pass Tracking". At any time to know the NET amount of free passes or i.o.u's outstanding, you'd simply subtract the debit balance of the "Free Pass Redeemed" account from the credit balance of the "Free Passes Given" account. At the end of your accounting year, when you review your total liabilities (i.e. the total credit balance of your Business Loans Outstanding, Business Credit Card Balances, Free Pass Given, Free Pass Redeemed and other liability accounts), the NET amount of both free pass liability accounts would artificially increase your total liabilities; however, to derive your "true" liabilities (monies that you owe to others), you would simply subtract the NET "free pass" liability balance from the total liability balance. You may wonder, why use a liability account to track free services? Two good reasons are as follows: 1) The passes are a liability of sorts (you give out passes therefore you would be hard pressed to deny anyone who presents them for entry at a later date - you are liable to provide the service promised). 2) Use of a liability and contra liability account will ensure that, at any time, you will have an accurate and timely record of all passes issued and of all passes redeemed, without ever accidentally affecting your income statement, asset tracking or statement of cash flows. This should do it. Any further questions contact Troy Bryant, Doorstep Mobile Tax, LLC (Atlanta, GA Metro). tbryant@dsmobiletax.com or 404.786.6309.

Yes Please!  I have been working on creating a traceable visitor's pass with a scanable bar code for weeks.  I created a promo code, but still cannot track by member.  This would help us tack what benefits members use and value.  it is KEY to serving our community.

Any news about when this feature will be released?

We would love if this capacity (issuing & tracking free passes/tickets) was available separate from memberships as well. We receive thousands of donation requests from other non-profits for tickets (we give a 4-pack of admission tickets) every year, and currently track these requests, and issued tickets, outside of Altru. It would be INCREDIBLE if these free tickets could be issued to a specific constituent in Altru, emailed directly to the constituent (ideally a customizable word merge doc, as well as some sort of printable eTickets with with an expiration date, but no specific admission date), & tracked when the passes are then used (perhaps as a discount).

It'd be nice for the online sales to cap of if the constituent has redeemed the limited amount of free tickets for a program per membership year, which resets when they renew their membership.