It is possible to automate the following Disbursement Processing tasks:
· Anticipated Aid
· Disbursements and Adjustments
· CommonLine Loan Disbursement
Automating these tasks provides users with the opportunity to minimize processing step, which helps to streamline the process of communicating anticipated and actual financial aid awards from PowerFAIDS to J1 Desktop. It is not required that any of these tasks be automated. Jenzabar recommends that you carefully consider your business practices and automate only those tasks that will benefit operations from scheduling it to execute regularly. It is highly recommended that users run each of these tasks interactively for a short period of time; you can automate a process once you are comfortable with it. Each task is discussed below detailing recommendations and requirements to help you evaluate automation choices.
The Anticipated Aid process calculates financial aid awarded a student and generates preliminary transactions in both Financial Aid and Business Office. This process is highly recommended for automation.
· Since Anticipated Aid is displayed on student billing statements, accuracy is important to the Business Office as students are generally expected to pay only those charges not covered by their awarded financial aid. It may also factor into the calculation of refund checks, which students seek when their financial aid exceeds their costs. Therefore, prompt transfer of anticipated aid from PowerFAIDS to J1 is desired.
· Automating Anticipated Aid can promptly update J1 with awards and award adjustments made in PowerFAIDS. Jenzabar recommends scheduling the process to occur daily Monday through Friday at short intervals (10 to 15 minutes) starting at 7 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m. This type of schedule achieves virtually real-time data transfer. Your school may determine that a less frequent interval meets your needs. Jenzabar recommends that you work with your Business Office to establish the best timing for your institution.
· Each school should monitor their automated Anticipated Aid runs to determine the average process completion time and adjust the time interval up or down as needed. Process runs scheduled to start when a previous run is still in progress will be skipped. Adjusting the timing will eliminate seeing many skipped processes logged and increase overall process efficiency.
· Anticipated Aid offers no trial run option and will only generate preliminary transactions for student awards that can be successfully validated. Therefore, periodic review of the error reports generated by Anticipated Aid is expected. Taking the time to troubleshoot and resolve all reported issues for each process run may not be feasible when Anticipated Aid is run every few minutes, hourly, or even daily. Jenzabar highly recommends that you plan to review the reports on a weekly basis at a minimum. It is only necessary to review the latest error report generated because the errors reported in each run represent all active records with problems. Refer to the Disbursement Processing Troubleshooting online Help topic for details on resolving specific error conditions. When all error conditions have been addressed, transactions will be successfully processed in the next Anticipated Aid run.
· Anticipated Aid runs are based on specific POE selections for the award year. Automated runs will need to be scheduled to start and end relative to the start and end dates for the selected POE. Jenzabar highly recommends that the initial process run for a POE selection be executed interactively. Most initial process runs will take longer to complete due to the expectation of a higher volume of new transactions to process at that time. Running interactively will also remind you to immediately review errors and to immediately address any setup issues, such as invalid POE ID or Fund, that affect many transactions.
The Disbursements and Adjustments to Student Accounts Update task generates financial aid transactions in both Financial Aid Manager and Business Office modules for records from the PowerFAIDS standard disbursement roster.
· Financial aid disbursements are credited to student accounts and must be promptly transferred from PowerFAIDS to J1. Some federal and state programs may have specific time requirements from point of disbursement authorization to actual disbursement to the student. Automating Disbursements and Adjustments to Student Accounts Update can help to meet such deadlines.
· Consider how frequently your school currently disburses funds. Schools expect to disburse funds at various times, perhaps once daily, several times a week, or even less frequently. If your school disburses routinely at designated times, then you can schedule Disbursements and Adjustments to run accordingly, perhaps once a day or on specific days of the week. If you disburse on an ???as needed??? basis, then scheduling Disbursements and Adjustments to run more frequently is recommended in order to process those rosters as soon as they are produced. If you disburse less frequently, then you may find it best to run Disbursements and Adjustments interactively.
· Running Disbursements and Adjustments creates suspended Business Office transactions. The Business Office must still review and post those transactions in order for the student account to be credited timely. Any decision to automate this process should involve coordination with the Business Office.
· Automating Disbursements and Adjustments requires that all disbursement rosters placed into the specified folder be processed. Multiple Disbursements and Adjustments processes can be scheduled to cover different folders. This might be useful if your school divides standard disbursement processing responsibility between several offices.
· Each disbursement roster is read separately and generates a unique group number in Business Office for all successfully validated records. Failed transactions are retained in temporary processing tables for review and will be processed later when the associated error conditions are resolved.
· The Disbursements Not Processed task allows all failed transactions to be monitored. It is not necessary to review each error report logged. This task displays all error conditions encountered for a specific transaction. See Disbursements Not Processed Window for full details on how to use this window to troubleshoot issues.
· It is possible to set up automatic notifications related to scheduled tasks. All financial aid users responsible for monitoring disbursement processing should be included in the notification process. When setting up a notification group, responsible Business Office staff should be included to immediately alert them to the need to review and post suspended disbursement transactions.
· Once disbursements are processed, it is important to run Anticipated Aid to clear existing preliminary transactions for the same record. If you have automated Anticipated Aid to run in the recommended short time interval, this will occur quickly. If you run Anticipate Aid more sporadically, then an interactive run immediately following your disbursement process is highly recommended.
The CommonLine Loan Disbursement task processes alternative loan fund disbursements only. Direct and In-House Loan funds must be processed via Disbursements and Adjustments. This process generates loan financial aid transactions in both Financial Aid Manager and Business Office modules.
· Alternative loans are private loans awarded to students. The loan fund awarded to students is generally subject to fees being extracted by their lender. Those fees may vary but generally fall around a specific percentage. During the Anticipated Aid process, preliminary transactions for loans are generated by reducing the gross award amount by a common percent for the specific fund. This is acceptable because it closely approximates the expected fee. However, when it is time to process the actual disbursement for the student, it must be the exact net amount and not a calculated approximation.
· The CommonLine loan disbursement authorization roster from PowerFAIDS transmits the precise net amount for each student to J1 to be promptly applied to the student account. Automating Loan Disbursement provides prompt processing of actual loan aid transactions.
· Jenzabar recommends that you consider how frequently you disburse alternative loans. If your school disburses loans routinely at designated times, then you can schedule CommonLine Loan Disbursements to run accordingly, perhaps once a day or on specific days of the week. If you disburse on an ???as needed??? basis, then scheduling CommonLine Loan Disbursements to run more frequently is recommended in order to process those rosters as soon as they are produced. If you disburse less frequently, then you may find it best to run CommonLine Loan Disbursements interactively.
· Automating CommonLine Loan Disbursements requires that all loan disbursement authorization rosters placed into the specified folder be processed. Each loan disbursement roster is read separately and generates a unique group number in Business Office for all successfully validated records. Failed transactions are retained in temporary processing tables for review and will be processed later when the error conditions associated are resolved. Refer to the CommonLine Loan Disbursements Troubleshooting online Help topic for details on resolving specific error conditions. A separate CommonLine Loan Disbursement task can also be scheduled to process only unprocessed transactions; however, any unprocessed transaction will automatically be reprocessed with each scheduled CommonLine Loan Disbursement task scheduled.
· Discuss your processing plan with Business Office. The Loan Disbursements process creates suspended transactions that require posting by Business Office in order to be fully credited to a student???s account.
Notifications regarding a scheduled job???s completion can also be set up and is highly recommended. Notification groups, methods, and process assignments require special task list security and are set up in the Common module. These notifications can appear in the module or be received via e-mail messages or both. The Financial Aid Manager module provides users with the assigned permissions access to review process notifications either by clicking on a special icon located at the far left of the Microhelp line or by selecting View Notifications from the Tools menu. View Notifications provides you with status information on the process. It may have completed, been skipped, or ended in error. It allows you to review any error and/or audit reports. You should review these notifications regularly. Notifications can include many users, and it is strongly recommended that Business Office be included.
Scheduled processes can be modified to alter the interval or delete the process altogether. It requires access to the Common Module and the Process Scheduler functions. This provides you with the scheduling flexibility to suit your processing needs, which may change due to time of year or other needs. See Process Schedule Window for more details on how to modify a process. This does not allow for changes in specific function parameters, such as POE selected for Anticipated Aid or the designated folder for Disbursements and Adjustments or CommonLine Loan Disbursements. It only applies to the timing of the process.
If your school's reconciliation process requires that all transactions contained in a disbursement roster exist in the same unique J1 AR Transaction group number, Jenzabar recommends that you do not automate Disbursements and Adjustments or CommonLine Loan Disbursements but instead process rosters interactively under the Trial Run option until error free or transition your reconciliation process to use the Disbursement Reconciliation Report.