Understanding Authorizing and Disbursing Financial Aid

Before you can authorize and disburse a student's aid, accepted financial aid awards must exist for the student. You must also set up global disbursement rules and financial aid item type disbursement rules for each eligible career before authorizing or disbursing awards.

After a student is awarded financial aid and accepts the award, you authorize each payment disbursement and disburse the money into the student's account. That is, disbursing financial aid to students includes two distinct steps:

1. The authorization process uses rules to determine whether a particular award can be disbursed to a student's account. The rules can be set up to apply to all students in a particular career or to particular awards for a career.

2. Disbursement is the transfer of funds from the Financial Aid system to the student's account in the PeopleSoft Student Financials system.

Financial aid awards can appear on the student's account:

• Before disbursement, as anticipated aid on a student's account.

• After disbursement, as actual awards credited to the student's account.

Financial Aid enables you to authorize and disburse aid to individual students or to a group of students. You authorize and disburse aid for a group of students using two background (batch) processes:

1. Authorize awards using background authorization.

   • Use the authorization calendar and background authorization run control page to determine which accepted awards are processed.

   • The background authorization process uses the global disbursement rules and any item type disbursement rules that you set up for the disbursement process, using the award's disbursement date to select the valid effective-dated global rules to enforce, item-type rules to enforce, or both.

   • You can run the authorization process first in test mode to identify potential unauthorized disbursements After resolving problems by making changes to student records, you can run the process again in update mode.

2. Disburse awards using background disbursement.

   • Authorized awards defined in the disbursement calendar are selected for the batch disbursement process.

     Use the background disbursement run control page to further control the records to be processed.

   • Awards that are authorized online but not disbursed online are included in the batch disbursement.

   • Awards for which the authorized amount equals the current disbursed amount are skipped.

Authorization and disbursement can be done online for individual students and the disbursement process immediately credits the student's account. If the authorization of an award is not successful, the system provides a message explaining each failure. You can revise the student's record and attempt to authorize the award again. If you are unable to authorize an award and want to override the rules that are set up for the career and the award, you can access another page and authorize the award using an override. Authorizing with an override should be done only in very special circumstances because after the award has been authorized, it is easily disbursed. An award can be disbursed only after it is successfully authorized.

When you define financial aid item types, you choose whether the award should be reflected on a student's account in PeopleSoft Student Financials as anticipated aid prior to disbursement. Anticipated aid is financial aid that you have awarded but not disbursed to a student.

You can view anticipated aid for a student in one of two ways:

• Use the Anticipated Aid by Term page to view the anticipated financial aid for the student, by term, for a designated aid year.

  You can use this page to determine which awards in each term have yet to be disbursed to a student. A net award amount of zero indicates that the award has been disbursed.

• Use the Anticipated Aid by Item Type page to view a student's anticipated financial aid for a particular term by financial aid item type.

You can use service impacts to prevent disbursement of financial aid funds. Disbursement authorization verifies whether an active service indicator exists for the disbursement term. If the service indicator has been assigned a service impact intended to stop the disbursement of funds, the item type fails authorization. Generally, negative service indicators should be used to hold disbursements.