Understanding Awarding and Packaging Students

Financial Aid provides sophisticated tools to package students. You can manually award students one at a time, auto package students one at a time using a packaging plan, or Mass Package a large number of students using several packaging plans. Manual awarding and Auto Packaging are performed using one of the award entry components. Mass Packaging is performed using a series of background processes, but you can review the results of each step using inquiry and summary pages. After running Auto Packaging or Mass Packaging, you can supplement a student's package by manually entering awards. Using the award entry pages (Student Aid Package page, Manual Student Packaging page, and Professional Judgement page), you can also override default Financial Aid Item Types attributes, such as the disbursement plan and split code. Manual awarding is done by inserting as many Financial Aid Item Types as you want to complete a student's package or by modifying an existing award.

You must validate awards after manual award entry or after making any changes to existing awards. Validation is performed automatically as part of the Auto Packaging and Mass Packaging processes. Validation checks eligibility rules, fiscal limits, aggregate limits, and any other Financial Aid Item Type rules for each award. Validation lowers award amounts for awards that cause an over-award or which exceed fiscal or aggregate limits. When manually awarding Pell Grants, Validation assists you by calculating the Pell Grant eligibility amount for students when you leave the offer field at zero dollars.

Note:

Before a student can be packaged, the U.S.E.D. database matches from the Central Processing System (CPS)/FAFSA Processing System (FPS) must be passed. If one of the matches is returned with an ineligible code, it must be resolved before the student can be packaged for federal assistance. The procedure for resolving ineligible conditions is described in the documentation for the Database Matches page.