Financial Aid

In 2024.2, there are new settings and windows to configure transfer of Student Life (Desktop or Web) housing information to Jenzabar Financial Aid using the Create Student Update for Financial Aid process. To transfer Student Life housing data, follow the steps outlined below:

For more information on setting up Financial Aid Manager to work with Student Life housing, see the Create Student Update for Jenzabar Financial Aid process guide and online help.

The Financial Aid Inquiry window no longer includes the EFC, Budget, and Need data provided on the Financial Aid tab.

You can now select multiple POEs to process on the Credit Hours Update/Report window. This is helpful for situations where your academic year might have overlapping terms or during active registration. Select the POEs you want to work with from the POEs to Process section.

For customers with multiple financial aid systems set as active, the Anticipated Aid process now keeps any anticipated aid transactions produced by one system (for example, PowerFAIDS Desktop) and when the second system is run, (such as Jenzabar Financial Aid), it adds in anticipated aid transactions for students with selected POEs to the student’s billing account. This is helpful when transitioning between systems where you might have data from a trailing summer program using PowerFAIDS Desktop but need to also report anticipated aid for the fall using Jenzabar Financial Aid, or in the future, PowerFAIDS Cloud.

The Disbursements and Adjustments process now reads records from the new FADisbursements table designed to directly receive disbursements from Jenzabar Financial Aid instead of generating .CSV files.

To use the process and correctly populate the new FADisbursements table, you’ll need to update the BILLINGPOSTURL API Configuration value in Jenzabar Financial Aid. In Administration, System, Configuration Values, expand the API section. Click the edit button to update the BILLINGPOSTURL value to https://yourschooladdress/J1Web/api/financialaid/directdisbursements.

When posted, the Billing Batch Exports from Jenzabar Financial Aid are written directly into the new FADisbursements table in the Jenzabar One database. You can work with those records in the redesigned Disbursements and Adjustments window.

When Jenzabar Financial Aid is selected in the Financial Aid System section, the following radio buttons are now available. They filter the disbursement batches received from Jenzabar Financial Aid and provide different actions.

The What to Process section is populated with information about the Jenzabar Financial Aid disbursement records, including:

Additionally, you can use the Disbursements Not Processed window to resolve any unprocessed disbursements. 

When running the Disbursements and Adjustments process, the earliest disbursement date is now communicated back to Jenzabar Financial Aid for federal awards after transaction groups are posted in the Business Office. This initial disbursed date is important to communicate to COD as it is the date when interest on the loan begins to accumulate.

There are several improvements to the Create Student Update process and associated windows. 

The TX FADB Report Data Collection now identifies student TASFA information based on the PowerFAIDS Custom Content date field that Jenzabar requires customers to designate as the TASFA Date. In PowerFAIDS, this field is user_date.value_200. The ISIR Posted field on the FM Data, Summary view no longer needs to be set to Yes. This enables the following FADB report data elements to be correctly populated from TASFA data:

When manually entering TASFA information, schools can now leave ISIR Posted field set to No and select the Force Need Analysis field to calculate the student’s need. This also satisfies auditors' concerns about incorrectly identifying students as having their ISIRs present.

The 2023-2024 financial aid award year is available in the Award Year Definition window.

Select the Active? checkbox when you are ready to work with it. You can also deselect Display in Dropdown? to remove it for now until the application system opens.

The Create Student Update for Financial Aid process now transfers First Time Degree Seeking students to JFA as part of the FAM_CreateStudentUpdateAsXML stored procedure. This data is important for IPEDS reporting.

When successfully transferred, the Registration tab in JFA displays YES or NO in the First Time Degree Seeking field according to the associated Academic Year and Term Name.

For more information about Create Student Update, see the Create Student Update for JFA Process Guide on MyJenzabar.net.

For more information about configuring J1 with JFA as your financial aid system, see the FAM with JFA Configuration Guide on MyJenzabar.net.

Create Student Update now transfers student data by individual student IDs or groups of IDs. You can now work with the specific data you need and drill down into individual student records.

To transfer students using individual ID instead of a query:

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There’s a new window to help you work with the student data sent to JFA using the Create Student Update for Financial Aid process. The Create Student Update Configuration window allows you to control which specific student data elements are transferred to JFA using the Create Student Update process. You can turn off or on certain tags sent in the Student Data Load (Academic Extract) API to narrow down what data is sent each time you run the Create Student Update process.

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Currently, you can choose to send or not send the following tag set:

You can also view:

When transferring student data to JFA using the Create Student Update process, you may want to view the information being sent. This is helpful for troubleshooting purposes, or for instances where you might transfer data to meet a temporary need. Select the new SAVE XML File checkbox to create a file and choose a location where your file will be saved to.

The <Housing Choice> tag is now transferred to JFA as part of the Student Data Load API when you run the Create Student Update process. In Desktop, the housing status details are tracked in the Residence Life tab of the Student Information window.

This data informs your school's Financial Aid office about a student’s residency. It’s important for setting COA (Cost of Attendance) and tracking where students live in relation to campus, such as if they are an Off Campus attendee.

Use the Institutional Reporting Definitions window to map the residency values you use in J1 to the three Housing Type codes used in JFA.

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When successfully transferred, this information appears in the Housing tab of the student's Profile in JFA.

When processing financial aid transaction groups in Accounts Receivable (AR) generated by Disbursements and Adjustments in Financial Aid Manager (FAM), JFA updates student accounts to reflect funded awards. This update is now communicated in sets of 100 to correspond with the default ARPAYLOADSIZE value of 100 in JFA's Configuration Values, API settings.

This eliminates the need for your school to monitor the size of the Billing Batch Export against the ARPAYLOADSIZE setting to ensure that all disbursements are successfully updated in JFA.

The Disbursements and Adjustments and Anticipated Aid processes now run with a student’s ID number instead of Social Security Number. Some students may not have been required to submit a Social Security Number in their records, but still have aid that needs to be applied to their account.

Some windows are only used depending on which financial aid system type (FAST) is active in your module. If you are working in a FAST-dependent window, you may be presented with a pop-up message if you don’t have the relevant financial aid system active or if your system doesn’t use that window.

The 2021-2022 financial aid award year is available in the Award Year Definition window. Select the Active? checkbox when you are ready to work with it. You can also deselect Display in Dropdown? to remove it for now until the application system opens.

When exporting student data to your financial aid system, the Create Student Update process will now use Database Transfer by default. PowerFAIDS J1 Desktop customers should no longer use the File Transfer option, as it does not include many of the required data options and is not supported by College Board.

For JFA users, the window continues to work as usual.

You can designate an award year as Inactive if you’ve finished working with it, or if it’s a future award year you don’t need to use yet. In the Award Year Definition window, deselect the Active? checkbox next to the award year you want to label as inactive.

In the POE Definition window, award years not in use will now appear in the Award Year drop-down as “Inactive.”

The Credit Hours Update no longer calculates only students with a SSN.

Previously, the Fund Master window cleared the 1098-T field and automatically assigned values based on the fund payment type. The column no longer operates this way. Now you should select the required value in the 1098-T Eligibility column of the Fund Master window when creating or editing a fund. Work with your business office to confirm that the fund code assigned is the appropriate code for 1098-T reporting.

In the Financial Aid Configuration window, the Jenzabar Financial Aid tab now includes a location to set the disbursement roster. This is the file created with the Billing Batch Export runs in JFA.

Use the Award Year Definition window to view, activate, or deactivate federal award years for financial aid applications. Activated award years are used to complete important processes or run reports.

You can also choose which award years you want to appear in the Award Year drop-down on other relevant windows, such as the POE Definition window. Click Display in Dropdown? to add a selected year.

Jenzabar Financial Aid (JFA) users can now run Credit Hours Update process in the Credit Hours Update/Report window. The process uses student records with POE mapped Year/Term codes in Student Course History instead of the ODBC connection checks used by PowerFAIDS.

The Fund Master window includes new fields, Fund Source and Federal Fund ID, to provide additional information about the type of funds that exist in PowerFAIDS and Jenzabar Financial Aid. Select options from the drop-down to identify funds for use in reports such as NSC – Enrollment Reporting and IPEDS.

You can also use the new Include in Anticipated Aid checkbox to indicate a fund should be reported for that process.

Jenzabar Financial Aid customers can now review all students who have been processed using Calculate Satisfactory Progress. Based upon how you evaluate SAP, select options in the Retrieval Criteria section to view the details. You will select the Year if your basis is Award Year, and if your basis is POE, as shown below, you will select the Year and Term.

Data will now populate automatically for both PowerFAIDS and Jenzabar Financial Aid customers as soon as you enter in the Retrieval Criteria prompts. The Retrieve button no longer appears on the window.