Ability to toggle what is included in encumbered funds or delineate encumbered amounts by season/cycle.
For the majority of the year we have two cycles open concurrently. Cycle A is the current aid year and Cycle B is the upcoming aid year. Cycle A is open and awarding is mostly finished while we are also trying to award in Cycle B. This makes it difficult to determine, in grid view, whether a student's encumbered funds are from Cycle A or Cycle B. When the Encumbered Funds field is showing a single dollar amount, we are unable to determine if those funds are from the current academic year (Cycle A) or the upcoming year (Cycle B) without looking directly into the student's account which is too time consuming for the volume of applicants we are sorting and awarding.
This becomes alleviated once we are able to archive the Cycle A opportunities, but we are unable to do so until May at the earliest, and we begin awarding Cycle B in February. It is a difficult process for us as system admins and even more difficult for opportunity admins because they have limited viewing capabilities. This results in us either requesting that they disregard the encumbered funds and award regardless, which requires system admins do a lot more final review processing; or opportunity admins request reports with appropriate encumbered amounts, which system admins have to create manually and, again, is very time consuming.
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Guest
- Sep 12 2019
- Reviewed: Voting Open
| Client Name "shard name" | uvu |
| User | System Admin , Opportunity Admin, Reviewer Chair |
| Functional Unit | Awards, Grids , Reports |
| Employee Name | Mary Derby |
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Restrict 'Encumbered Amount' to Your Scopes Only
Merged Currently, our users can't rely on 'Encumbered Amount' at all as it isn't limited to your scopes. It would be so much more useful if this # reflected only the amount for your scopes as users could then rely on it when awarding across multiple funds.0 Reviewed: Voting Open
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Award period refinement for reconciliation
Merged I'd like for the award period to present differently in the OA view, specifically, instead of a total amount grouped in "Fall 2019 and Spring 2020", I'd like to see a column for Fall, a column for Spring, and column for the total. When we reconcil...0 Reviewed: Voting Open
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Show total encumbered for applicant by Scope
Merged We do lots of awarding at the Conditional Application level with Auto Matches. In many cases, students apply to more than one Conditional App (ie: College of Business AND International Affairs). When the admins for that Cond App are awarding, they...0 Reviewed: Voting Open
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Need an "Encumbered Sourced to Conditional" field
Merged I have multiple conditional applications. When it is time for me to send "not-awarded" letters to the students who were not selected, there's not an easy way for me to look at the grid and say "these are my students who got money from THIS conditi...0 Reviewed: Voting Open
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Make Encumbered Funds View tied to Scope
Merged We would like to hide encumbered funds from opportunity admins if those funds are from other scopes. We want them to view encumbered funds within their scope but not from other scopes.0 Reviewed: Voting Open
Related Enhancements
AppState would greatly appreciate something that resolves this issue. Each of our 7 colleges is affected by the same problem with the system. Being able to view encumbered funds by year would be a huge improvement.
We have multiple community colleges sharing the same system, and it would be wonderful if we can continue to award through the second (Spring semester) while accepting applications for the following award year. It seems very complicated if you are not just a single college using the system as stand alone. We would welcome a solution with specific detailed info on how it would would work.
Similar request from KU -
"I have multiple conditional applications. When it is time for me to send "not-awarded" letters to the students who were not selected, there's not an easy way for me to look at the grid and say "these are my students who got money from THIS conditional." Encumbered amount doesn't help me, because I am specifically looking for students who didn't get any money from funds sourced to this conditional. Encumbered funds are ALL monies across the board, so that is not an accurate figure for me. When awarding hundreds of students, you can see why this process is otherwise very taxing for one person to do. I would like an additional field added that specifies if a student has received money from the conditional."
YES! This is critical to our process, as we have special seasons for Winter/Summer Scholarships but the students who receive these look like they have already received enough help in the Encumbered Funds Column. Then they are not considered for the current season, because their application has funds from a recent opportunity, which is in a different season.
Similar to Wisconsin-Madison, the merged enhancement from UOregon explains the need to separate values by scope:
"We do lots of awarding at the Conditional Application level with Auto Matches. In many cases, students apply to more than one Conditional App (ie: College of Business AND International Affairs). When the admins for that Cond App are awarding, they want to see the amount encumbered for their own applicants/funds within their own scope. Right now, if a student received funds from The College of Business, then when International Affairs is looking at their list of applicants, they don't want to see funds encumbered by another department on campus, they just want to see their own encumbered amounts. "
Please see similar request from MSU Billings in the merged enhancement; description below -
"I'd like for the award period to present differently in the OA view, specifically, instead of a total amount grouped in "Fall 2019 and Spring 2020", I'd like to see a column for Fall, a column for Spring, and column for the total. When we reconcile with Financial Aid and the Business Office, we look at the amounts allocated to each semester, but in BAM I can only get a total amount and have to manually divide out the amounts for each semester. Maybe make this an option in Fund Disbursement to see disbursement in semester-by-semester detail."
Please see similar request from Wisconsin-Madison in the merged enhancement; their request is specifically for scopes within one cycle, but they're running into the same underlying challenge -
"Currently, our users can't rely on 'Encumbered Amount' at all as it isn't limited to your scopes. It would be so much more useful if this # reflected only the amount for your scopes as users could then rely on it when awarding across multiple funds."