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Understanding Manual Awarding, Auto Packaging, and Auto Select Packaging

The Award Entry component is used for manual awarding, Auto Packaging, and Auto Select Packaging. Use the Student Aid Package page for online manual awarding and Auto Packaging. View how each award affects unmet need and total aid amounts on the Need Summary page. Totals are updated on the Need Summary page after Validation. View the student's Financial Aid Term and term budget information on the Term Summary page.

Note boxes below field descriptions offer tips and directions for entering Pell Grants. If you set the award offer amount to zero dollars, the system calculates Pell Grants when Validation is run.

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To award manually, populate the tabs on the Student Aid Package page and insert additional rows of awards as needed. To have the Validation process populate the offered amount for an award, leave the Offered field at zero and validate the award. For example, to determine the correct Pell Grant amount for a student, enter the Pell Grant financial aid item type, leave the offer amount at zero, and click the Validate button; the Pell Grant amount is calculated based on the student's eligibility and institutional rules and returned to the page with the scheduled disbursements.

After you enter all the awards for a student, run the Validation process before posting the awards to the award tables. Validation checks that the student is eligible for the awards and that no packaging rules have been violated. Validation includes edits for minimum and maximum award limits, aggregate limits, fiscal fund availability, federal eligibility, and financial aid item type rules. Validation can reduce an award amount or set an award amount to zero to comply with rules and limits. Validation must be successful before you can run the Posting routine, the final step for manually awarding students.

You can combine manual awarding with Auto Packaging. If you do not want a manually entered award to be discarded during Auto Packaging, select the Lock check box. Auto Packaging discards all unlocked awards, and these same financial aid item types can be re-awarded if the award is included in the packaging plan. However, for awards of a financial aid item type that have disbursement protection activated and have been at least partially disbursed, Auto Packaging preserves these awards but reduces the award amount to the amount that has been disbursed. Also, when the Packaging routine processes awards in active/passive mode (such as multicareer packaging, multiple award period processing, or Pell-only repackaging), Auto Packaging does not cancel awards processed in passive mode.

Auto Packaging assigns awards to a student based on the rules of the selected packaging plan so your packaging plans must be established before you can use the Student Aid Package page for Auto Packaging. Auto Packaging can be combined with manual awarding by changing the awards entered by the packaging plan or adding additional awards.

Auto Packaging assigns awards and validates the awards all at once. Validation checks that the student is eligible for the awards given and that no packaging or financial aid item type rules have been violated. Validation includes edits for minimum and maximum award limits, aggregate limits, fiscal fund availability, federal eligibility, and financial aid item type rules. Validation can reduce an award amount or set an award amount to zero to comply with rules and limits. If you make no changes to the awards after Auto Packaging, you can post the awards to the award tables directly. If you make manual changes to any awards after Auto Packaging, you click the Validate button to ensure the student is still eligible for the changed or new awards.

Warning! If you repackage locked or disbursed awards using Auto Packaging, post that set of awards (click the Post button) before performing any validation activity (click the Validate button). That is, if you use Auto Packaging to repackage a student who has locked awards, disbursed awards, or both, click the Post button first. Do not click the Validate button immediately after Auto Packaging. If you manually change an Auto-Packaged set of awards, post before validating. If you click the Validate button before posting a set of awards that was returned from Auto Packaging, it can potentially compromise the synchronization between offer and accept amounts as well as produce a different award than anticipated.

Note: If the student does not have locked or disbursed awards, you can repackage that student using Auto Packaging and then manually change the awards or validate without posting first.

Auto Select Packaging selects the packaging plan for an individual student and career by using the selection criteria (equation) and processing order associated with your packaging plans. This is the same selection criteria and processing order used by Mass Packaging.

When you leave the Packaging Plan ID field blank and click the Retrieve button, the system evaluates the Packaging Plan table sequentially and assigns the first packaging plan for which the student qualifies. The system next packages a set of eligible awards according to the packaging rules defined on the packaging plan.

Note: Before using Auto Select Packaging, ensure that your processing order is correctly set in your Packaging Plan table.

The Need Summary page displays the student's Cost of Attendance (COA), Pell COA, Alternate Pell COA, Expected Family Contribution (EFC), federal and institutional need, federal and institutional award totals, need-based aid award totals, federal methodology (FM) and institutional methodology (IM) special need/cost aid award totals, unmet need, and unmet COA.

The Need Summary page displays the prorated EFC (federal) and institutional EFC values for a student used to determine the student's need. When using different application data sources for packaging, it is important to understand how the EFC and need are affected by different packaging data source selections. For example:

Scenario 1: When the packaging data source on the Financial Aid Defaults page equals Fed Only, Fed, Inst, or Inst, Fed and only federal data exists for the student, if you award a financial aid item type with an institutional packaging methodology, the financial aid item type is awarded based on the institutional need. But, if you do not have institutional application data and analysis, institutional need equals institutional COA, because the institutional EFC is 0.00 USD. The Packaging routine awards institutional financial aid item types up to the institutional COA.

Scenario 2: When the packaging data source on the Financial Aid Defaults page equals Inst Only, Fed, Inst, or Inst, Fed and only institutional data exists for the student, if you award a financial aid item type with a federal packaging methodology, the financial aid item type is awarded based on the federal need. But if you do not have federal application data and analysis, federal need equals federal COA, because the federal EFC is 0.00 USD. The Packaging routine awards federal financial aid item types up to the federal COA.

If your institution uses IM for early awarding—in October, as an example—and you want to include estimated federal awards, set the Packaging Methodology field on the FA Item Type 2 page for your federal financial aid item types to Institutional Methodology. This allows the Packaging processes to use the same need calculation for all the awards; because you have only institutional data you use institutional need. When the federal aid year begins on January 1, you must change the Packaging Methodology field back to Federal for all your federal financial aid item types. You must also make sure that the student has application data compatible with the packaging data source you indicated on the Financial Aid Defaults page.

Sometimes a manual change to the student's budget does not automatically propagate to the need summary totals. In this case, if you create selection criteria that rely on need-related elements, such as Unmet Need, Overaward Need, Unmet COA, or Overaward COA, the system is not using the most current calculated values.

Run the Need Summary Validation process before performing online packaging (manual, Auto, or Auto Select), Mass Packaging, online Repackaging (manual, Auto, or Auto Select), or batch Repackaging. This ensures that need-related elements, which may be part of your selection equation or PS Query, are updated and reflect the most recent changes to COA. You can run the batch Need Summary Validation process at any time. After you run it on your population, you do not need to run it again unless you make budget changes to several students using the Student Budget Maintenance component. To make a single change online, use the Update Need Summary button on the Student Budget Maintenance page (STDNT_TERM_BUDGET).