Financial Aid Business Processes

Financial Aid supports local management and awarding of federal aid, state aid, institutional aid, departmental aid, and scholarship funds. After you set up the system based on your institution's rules and practices, you can begin to receive and track financial aid applications. The awarding practice takes place when your institution receives the ISIR, PROFILE, or institutional application. After you load need analysis data, the system activates the student for the aid year. Activation of the aid year is the first step in updating student data for financial aid processing.

You can manually award a student or use award plans to automatically package a student. The Packaging process finds the best combination of aid to meet a student's financial need. Disbursing aid to students involves authorizing each disbursement. The system checks the disbursement rules that you have defined and determines whether a particular award can be disbursed. For the aid cycle to be successful, you must verify selected students, handle ISIR corrections, process budgets, track requested documents and loan applications, and monitor spending and reconciliation of funds.

The following process flow illustrates the Financial Aid business process:

Image: Financial aid business process

Financial Aid Business Process