Planning Hour Definitions

In order to have the system total the number of hours or courses that a student is registered to take, you must tell it how to calculate the totals.

·       On the Hours Definition window, enter the table and columns to be looked at to determine hours or courses to total.

·       On the Hours Definition window, enter values in those fields that determine which bucket to put the totals in and whether the total is for number of credit hours, tuition hours, course clock hours, or courses. Student Hours information can consist of credit hours count, tuition hours count, course clock hours, and course count. When the student charges process runs, the program calculates each student's number of hours or courses. This information is stored on the Student Hours/Courses table. The charge details can be set up to use buckets from this table to determine charge amounts.

·       On the Hours Definition window, enter the table and columns to use in the accumulation of hours or courses for which the student is registered.

The following general rules can be used to designate where to use the Division code:

·       If the student can only take courses in one division at a time or if they can take courses in multiple divisions but are charged the same regardless of division, then use the division code in the Charges Detail table.

·       If the students can take courses in different divisions in the same term and are charged differently for each, then place the course division code in the Hours Definition and Hours Detail tables and create a separate bucket on the Student Hours/Courses table for each. This creates a separate hours code for each division. Under this configuration, a student is charged for 15 hours at the Undergraduate rate and for 3 hours at the Graduate rate. In the Hours Definition, the system needs to check the Course Division column on the Student Course History table in order to keep different hour or course totals per division on the Student Hours/Courses table. This is in addition to the Transaction Status column mentioned above.

·       Rather than using the Current Division at the Charge Table level, you may want to use the Course Division at the Hours Definition level, which implies that the student can take courses in different divisions in the same term and be charged based on the division of the course regardless of the students current division classification. You must configure the system to keep separate totals for each course division in which the student is registered. Therefore, we may want to have a separate hours code for each division.

For each hours code you can define up to five columns to check. Some columns from system tables that organizations typically use to determine hour/course counts are listed in the table below:

Try to limit the number of definitions or hour codes to reduce processing time when generating charges. For our example, we only need to define one hour code and place one variable (the Transaction status column from the Student Course History table) in it. In other words, the Transaction Status is checked to see if the course was dropped.

If you need a separate count for each division, you can create a separate hours code for each .  

Technically, you would not need to create a separate hours code for each since they all use the same variables. However, this is accomplished by creating one hours code that can be used for all of them and separating the divisions in the Hours Detail table.

By creating one hours code for all three divisions since they use the same variables, the amount of time is takes to run the Charges Generation program is greatly reduced.

Before we can tell the computer to use this column, an hours code must be defined. This simply creates a unique code into which we can place hours definitions. You may have more than one hours code if necessary.