It is possible to automate Create Student Update for Financial Aid. Automating this task provides you with the opportunity to minimize processing steps, which helps to streamline the process of communicating key demographic and enrollment data from J1 to PowerFAIDS.
Create Student Update for Financial Aid allows users to send select data elements in J1 Desktop, as defined in Configure Optional Data Elements for Transfer, to PowerFAIDS. If you change this data set frequently based on the query group you target, the calendar date, or for any other reason, it is recommended that you continue to run this process interactively.
In addition to the data set defined by Configure Optional Data Elements for Transfer, there are additional data decisions made from the Create Student Update for Financial Aid window. These include the query group, the academic year to extract data, the POE group, and the award year to update in PowerFAIDS. This may prompt you to set up multiple automated Create Student Update tasks to routinely execute or to restrict the time frame that you allow a specific configuration to execute.
For example, you may want to schedule Create Student Update to process Admissions candidates more frequently than current students because the data set and many of their data elements may change more frequently as they advance through the admissions cycle than students who are currently enrolled.
You can elect to send data to PowerFAIDS via direct database or an ASCII file transfer. Either method can be processed for loading into PowerFAIDS via a scheduler process in PowerFAIDS. If you elect to schedule the External Update process in PowerFAIDS, you must consider that it should not conflict with the execution of the Create Student Update for Financial Aid process in J1 Desktop. Each process must be scheduled to run at distinct times, allowing sufficient time for each process to complete before the other process begins. This is particularly important when you perform a database transfer.