Expanded Disbursement Script Bindings

Expanded disbursement scripting support provides access to disbursement information through the shared disbursement binding across applicable scripts. 

  • The expanded disbursements binding now has access to,
    • Anticipated, actual, cancellation, ledger, return, and right-to-cancel dates; payment and disbursement identifiers; award-year information; and indicators such as CommonLine Loan status values 
    • Calculated amounts, including applicable fees, net and incremental disbursement amounts, overrides, prior-enrollment disbursements, and interest rebates values. 
  • Some amount values are totals across the disbursements in the current script scope, and certain values apply only to Direct Loan disbursements. 

The additional bindings are available wherever configured scripts can access disbursement data, allowing you to use the expanded information consistently across applicable disbursement-related configuration including awarding, NFR, ISIR, origination, enrollment, and other related configuration scripts. Review the configuration update documentation before using a field to confirm its source, calculation method, and suitability for the intended criteria.

Business Benefit: Institutions can use more complete disbursement information to configure criteria that better align with their policies and reduce reliance on delivered logic where additional institutional evaluation is needed.

Steps to enable and configure

Use the Opt In UI to enable this feature. For instructions, refer to the Optional Uptake of New Features section of this document.

Offering: Student Financial Aid

  • Confirm the existing permission required to update configuration.
  • Identify if an existing or new configured groovy script should be updated to leverage new bindings aligning with your institution’s intended policy.
  • Update the script to reference the additional binding fields needed for the criteria.
  • Validate the updated criteria with representative scenarios in a non-production environment, then deploy it through the established configuration process.

Tips and considerations

  • This update provides additional scripting data; it doesn’t change the delivered system logic for existing pre-defined disbursement criteria. 
  • The new bindings are available to all applicable configuration that can access disbursement data; no separate enablement is required for each configuration area.
    • Note: New direct bindings disbursementNumber and disbursementDate were added for individual disbursements currently being evaluated in configurable disbursement criteria. However the new collection properties: disbursements.disbursementNumbers and disbursements.disbursementDates are available through the expanded shared disbursements binding.
  • Disbursement amount bindings are calculated totals for the applicable disbursement scope, rather than necessarily individual stored values.
  • The Direct Loan-specific fee amount, net disbursement amount, and interest rebate amount bindings return zero for non-Direct Loan disbursements.
  • The prior enrollment disbursement amount is a calculated total across applicable payment periods, not a single payment-period value.
    • For example, payment-period values of 100.00 and 50.00 return 150.00.
  • Existing criteria scripts continue to use only the fields they reference.

Key resources