September FA Coffee Break: FA Term
When does everyone stop projecting using updates and projections on the run control? There were different opinions. Some would leave projections on. Another school turns fall off after spring census. Other schools turns off projections because it takes so long to run, so they only project to a certain point. One school pointed out that after the driver kicks off you can clear out the ones that don’t you don't need to build--can do that with equation engine. Some schools archive rows, but it doesn’t seem to speed up run times. You can also turn off the flag on the Student CAR Term record.
What is the best way to run two aid years? When running two aid years at a time you run the forward year first and the past year last, which creates a lot of rows. This is the way Oracle recommends doing it. Projection does cause it partly, but even without that just building the two years does cause a lot of rows. Fall doesn’t get so many rows, but spring does. The reason to do this is that summer projections appear past from the future year, but are still often future or active for the current year. Run controls on FA Term used to have a problem with Aid Years but that has been fixed (unlike with budgets). Some schools though do older year first, then run related jobsets, then run the forward year second and related jobsets. This is usually done because of pressure from other offices to get certain things done by a specific time.
Questions about the use or non-use of census-date setup on the FA Term setup pages. This is used mostly to get Pell Grant to calculate correctly when schools use the Optional Last Day to Recalculate guidance in the handbook. If you do use this and receive an initial ISIR after the fact (and are thereby doing the initial calculation after the load has locked) then you will need to update the load to when that initial calculation is done. Also there was a discussion about how to set a census date (optional last day to recalculate) when there are modules. This is a little more difficult because the default is used for everyone in a career and it means there have to be other automation solutions or manual reviews to get the Pell correct.
One field that is sometimes updated is the NSLDS Loan Year and Direct Lending Year that would allow you to project enrollment and award loans at the anticipated level. Using an expiration date didn’t seem to work on its own, probably because it wasn’t set to build a new row. Schools that don’t set the lock run the updates every night until grades from the prior semester are posted. PeopleBooks say that NSLDS Loan Year and Direct Lending Year do follow the expiration date, but there is something that must have gone wrong. Another school confirms they have the same issue with not everyone expiring when they use the override method.
Thanks to all of those who attended and contributed. The recording is posted at https://www.heug.org/p/do/sd/sid=30795&isnew=1&type=0