Disbursement Rules

Authorization and disbursement are the two parts of delivering financial aid funds to students:

  • The authorization process applies user-defined global and financial aid item type specific disbursement rules to determine whether awards are eligible for disbursement and determines the amount eligible for disbursement.

  • When the awards are successfully authorized, disbursement is the actual delivery of financial aid funds to the student's account in Student Financials.

WARNING:

To ensure that the Financial Aid Authorization and Disbursement processes function correctly, implement Student Financials first. Implementing Financial Aid without Student Financials requires the creation of modified interfaces to update the Financial Aid loan system with confirmation that student loan funds have been applied to the student's account.

You define authorization process rules by aid year, career, and award (financial aid item type). These rules allow or prevent the disbursement of awards for students in a particular career or for a particular award. A Validation process during awarding or packaging checks on a variety of rules and limits, but student information, particularly registration information, can change before disbursement occurs. The Authorization process checks rules just before the disbursement of awards, either online or in a background authorization process.

Global disbursement rules can apply to all students in a particular career and check that packaging, federal verification, and review of the student's financial aid files are complete. Service impacts and tracking groups can be checked as a global rule. Global rules can hold financial aid if the student has withdrawn, honor any disbursement hold that might exist elsewhere in the system, and withhold disbursement for unsatisfactory academic progress.

Item type disbursement rules for particular awards are associated with a career, so different rules can be defined for each career in which the award is used. Many disbursement rules can be applied to an award, such as:

  • Checking a student's academic load and academic level against the load and level used to determine thee student's budget or award package.

  • Holding if a student is overawarded, has withdrawn, or has other holds in the system.

  • Verifying membership in a particular student group, such as an ethnic group, athletic team, geographic location, honor students, or particular field of study.

  • Using checklists, tracking groups, or service impacts.

The background disbursement process uses disbursement and authorization calendars to determine when awards can be disbursed to students:

  • Authorization calendars indicate the careers and terms that are eligible for authorization and if aid can be authorized more than once for that term, or reauthorized. Reauthorization retests the student's eligibility criteria to ensure that the student is still eligible for awards previously authorized and that changes made after the prior authorization have not made the student ineligible for the award.

  • Disbursement calendars control which awards, by career, are disbursed for a particular term. You can disburse all awards, all awards except a defined subset, or only a subset of awards. Use the disbursement calendar to control when certain awards are disbursed during the aid year.

The calendars are both effective-dated so you can set up your background disbursement plans for the entire aid year with effective dates for your second, third, and subsequent terms that determine when the awards are disbursed. Alternatively, you can use the same effective date on your calendar for all terms and use run control parameters to control the order in which awards are disbursed. Run control parameters can restrict the background authorization and disbursement processes to only a subset of terms and financial aid item types or can improve processing efficiency by dividing the total population of aid students into several smaller groups that you run sequentially.