Understanding Packaging Basics
The items covered in Understanding Packaging Basics are the basic items required for all three modes of packaging (manual, auto, and mass). If your institution is only going to use manual awarding, you only need to perform setup tasks in Understanding Packaging Basics. If you are going to use Auto Packaging or Mass Packaging, you must perform the setup tasks outlined in the Setting Up Auto Packaging and Mass Packaging.
This section lists prerequisites and common elements and discusses:
Award adjustment reasons.
Early financial aid offers.
Awarding versus packaging.
Financial aid item types.
Before you begin to set up your institution's financial aid item types and your awarding and packaging rules, you must:
Set up your institution's installation defaults and other basic elements of the financial aid application processing cycle (such as aid year and valid careers for aid year).
Set up your item types for financial aid in PeopleSoft Student Financials—you cannot set up your financial aid item types until you have set up item types.
Establish your financial aid terms.
Review the concepts of tablesets and setIDs.
If you plan to use admissions rating components as criteria for awarding certain awards, you must:
Have a list of the rating components used by the admissions office at your institution.
Know what the various rating components are used for and what names have been used for them in PeopleSoft Recruiting and Admissions.
Before using the Equation Processor you should know what fields are valid for use in equations and what their names are. A list of valid fields can be found in the "Using the Equation Processor" section. Packaging equations are used for queries and selections from the database and to calculate values.
|
Field or Control |
Definition |
|---|---|
| Copy |
Used to access a page where you can copy data you have already entered into something new you are creating. For example, you can copy information from one financial aid year to another aid year or from one career to another career within the same aid year. |
Financial aid counselors use award adjustment reasons to document why they made a change to the student's award. Award adjustment reasons are available for you to edit, add to, or delete. Award adjustment reasons are required by the Professional Judgement page, and they can also enhance your ability to track patterns in awarding.
If you plan to offer early financial aid awards, and you want to use broad categories of aid instead of specific awards, you must set up these broad categories from which a student could be awarded early financial aid. For instance, you can create categories for scholarships, loans, grants, and work-study. When you actually create an early financial aid offer, you use these categories instead of financial aid item types.
A note about terminology: Awarding and packaging are terms that are often used interchangeably. In this book, awarding is used to mean the activity of choosing one financial aid award at a time for a student. Packaging is used to refer to a process in which many awards are given to a student at one time to make a financial aid award package.
Financial aid item types are selected item types that your institution has assigned to the funds awarded as financial aid. The item type is used to map the financial aid award transaction to the appropriate general ledger account during the general ledger process. The way item types are classified governs whether they are considered as financial aid item types.
Setting up your item types for financial aid requires several major steps:
Add keywords on the Keywords page to simplify the search for a financial aid item type in a search dialog box.
Keywords that you might use for your item types include grants, loans, work (for work-study), scholarship, and merit.
Note: Financial aid and bursar offices should work together to set up your keywords so that a keyword standard can be defined for your institution.
Set up the item types used by financial aid in the Item Types component.
Set up financial aid item types.
Set up fiscal item types to define the amount of spending money for a particular fund.
Note: Use the same setID for all of your financial aid item types.