Understanding Student Budgets
At the beginning of the processing year, you create budgets detailing the cost of attendance (COA) for each term a student is enrolled. The COA is an estimate of a student's educational expenses for the period of enrollment. The budget helps establish a student's need COA minus the student's expected family contribution, which permits the financial aid office to award need-based aid.
This section discusses budget calculations.
After you complete budget setup, you calculate student budgets, either in batch, online, for an individual using batch rules, or manually. Use batch background budget assignment when you have large numbers of students to process. You can run this process overnight. For a small number of students, create a budget online using the Create Student Budgets page and use the same rules as batch background budget assignment. To skip budget rules, use the Student Budget Maintenance page to build budgets manually or to override an existing budget.