Disbursements....that moment students have been waiting for and that moment where you triple check to make sure you get the money to the right students at the right time!
Many of us have that war story where it didn’t go exactly as planned, but it does give us all an opportunity to learn from these mistakes. So have you ever...
- Had your run controls set with the wrong term in the prompt so aid disbursed when it shouldn’t have?
- Forgot to check the honor disbursement date – so all aid, including Federal Aid was disbursed?
- Forgot to run other processes such as SAP or forgot to assign User Edits Message/Checklist so that aid doesn’t go to ineligible students?
Timing of authorization, disbursements, and refunds varies at many institutions, but here are some of the common practices.
- Many schools are authorizing funds about a month before to allow time to work failed authorization; others are running right before bills since a status of authorized is utilized to pass as anticipated aid and some run the authorization process in a recently refreshed non-production environment and wait to run authorizations in production when they are ready to disburse!
- The frequency of disbursements ranges from 1-6 days a week with some reducing the frequency after peak times or programming certain dates when disbursements don’t run for administrative purposes. Many schools are disbursing 10 days prior while others are waiting until after census to disburse.
- A common best practice is to run the authorization/disbursement jobs when students/team members are typically not active in the system or to remove self-service access while the jobs is running and then grant access again when it is completed!
- Refunding schedules generally are following the disbursement schedule, but a common practice is to issue paper checks on a less frequent schedule to encourage direct deposit!
It is important from an audit perspective that you have controls in place to ensure Separation of Duties in that the functions of authorizing and disbursing FSA funds remain separate. Here are some controls that many schools are implemented:
- Lock down security to manual authorize and disburse aid
- Utilize a batch user to run mass authorization and disbursement – so that individual OPERIDs are not tied to mass authorization/disbursement
- Compensating control of audit queries
- Remove the ‘Disbursement’ button from the page
There is always that scenario when you have to override the authorization and you don’t want the authorization override to get clobbered. This can be accomplished by utilizing the ‘Reauthorize All Aid’ flag on the ‘Set up Disbursement Calendars’ page and the order and timing of running batch the authorization and disbursements.
Thanks to all of those who attended and contributed. The recording is posted (recording starts at 11:00): https://heug.zoom.us/rec/share/WV8u8Ea_nXhjub01NMoC9fzAp8B74s_5My24iD9W5p6KilKwcsyAdKKDL0f9nvJ1.R9J0sU3SBdgiMTt_
Passcode: 6ZvfCjL.
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