Glossary

Activity tracking member

A way to categorize activity tracking templates. You can use members when you search for activities assigned to individuals. You can also use members to restrict who can view or use activities. An activity tracking template can be associated with only one member.

You have a member called Admissions that you associate with activity tracking templates associated with the admissions process such as required admissions documents and reminders to admissions staff to follow up with applicants. You restrict this member to people who work in the Admissions Office so other offices can’t see this information.

Activity tracking members

Activity tracking template

A collection of one or more workflows that trigger specific tasks or store information when associated with a person in Campus Cafe. You can find all individuals with a specific activity tracking template assigned to them.

You create an activity tracking template instructors assign to students with poor academic performance. One workflow triggers an email to your advising office while another workflow records the alert so you can report on it later.

Activity tracking templates

Activity tracking

Admissions portal

Let you create inquiry forms and admissions applications that individuals can complete. The information flows into Campus Cafe.

You create separate admissions applications for your undergraduate and graduate academic programs.

Set up admissions forms

Admissions progress code

The status of an individual who has applied to your institution. The person may have a code that indicates they have merely inquired, have applied, have been accepted/admitted or have placed a deposit to secure their place in the freshman class. You can find people based on their admissions progress allowing you to work with them at different stages of the admissions process.

Kat fills out an inquiry form and receives an admissions progress code of inquired. An admissions officer reviews individuals with this code and contacts Kat encouraging her to submit an application. Kat submits an application and her progress code switches to applied. She’s admitted, switching her code again and then she places a deposit that changes her to a deposited code. Your New Student team looks for individuals with a deposited code and sends them an email inviting them to orientation.

Admissions cycle

Award year

A period of time, typically an academic year, during which a student is eligible to receive financial aid. It usually spans from the start of one academic year to the end of the next, such as from fall of one year to spring of the following year. The award year is used to determine the financial aid package for the student.

Your institution offers classes in summer, winter, spring and fall. You define your award year as starting the first day of summer and ending the last day of spring. Hence, student awards such as federal loans and Pell grants can’t exceed their maxiumn annual limits when you combine these awards for all these semesters.

Packaging

Bill batch

After you run group billing to assess charges to students, you must run bill batch to apply the charges to student ledgers/bills.

Your assistant billing director ran group billing to assess charges based on rules she created. As the billing director, you run bill batch that lets you review the charges for accuracy before being posted to student ledgers.

Bill batch

Cash batch

When you record payments in Campus Cafe or receive them from a payment processor, Campus Cafe places them in cash batch for review. Payments must be posted before appearing on student ledgers or your general ledger.

A student makes a payment for tuition on Sunday night. The payment enters cash batch and on Monday you post it triggering it to show on the student’s bill and your institution’s general ledger.

Cash batch

Constituent

Individuals or organizations with a relationship to your institution beyond an academic connection, including, but not limited to donors, parents or companies that hosts interns. Students and faculty may also have constituent records, if, for example, they donate to the institution.

Sally McBride donates to your institution and you want to record her biographical information and the gift.

Constituents

Cost center

Part of your general ledger that lets you associate revenue and expenses with broad categories. You can assemble multiple cost centers into cost center groups for reporting purposes.

You may have cost centers for the Provost Office, College of Arts, College of Engineering, Student Housing and Athletics. You group the provost and colleges under Academic Affairs. Student Housing and Athletics are grouped under Auxiliary Services.

Cost centers and cost center groups

Cost of attendance

The estimated costs for a student to attend your institution. Costs may include expenses such as tuition, room and board and travel. You need to establish costs of attendance to award your students federal financial aid.

Your tuition is different for undergraduate students and graduate students. In addition, only undergraduate students can live on campus. Hence, you create two Costs of Attendance: one for undergraduate students and one for graduate students. The undergraduate cost includes the average housing cost for institutional, on-campus housing while the graduate cost of attendance includes the average cost for an off-campus apartment in your city. The tuition is different for each Cost of Attendance in line with your published tuition costs.

Cost of attendance

Custom control

Set how a Campus Cafe feature works. Each control consists of a Sequence Number and a Parameter Number.

Tell Campus Cafe which payment processor to use

Custom Controls

Dashboard

Campus cafe delivers several informational pages that people see when they log in to Campus Cafe. These dynamic pages display different data depending on who is accessing Campus Cafe. The information shown updates as the data changes. Note Campus Cafe doesn’t deliver a dashboard for students, instead use the student portal.

Campus Cafe delivers an admissions dashboard that you configure to show number of applicants awaiting a decision assigned to the admissions officer logged in. As the admissions offer makes decisions, the number of applicants awaiting decisions decreases.

Dashboards

Database trigger

Monitor the Campus Cafe platform for user-defined changes. When a change occurs, an activity tracking template can be triggered.

You create a trigger to notify an instructor when a student withdraws from their course.

Database triggers

Degree Audit

A way for you to list all the requirements for a student to graduate with a specific academic program (major). A degree audit includes all the requirements but not when to take them. To provide a plan for when students take specific required classes, use the Plan of Study.

For your math major, you list the 20 specific core math courses a student must take. You also include general education categories like science, literature, foreign language, etc. that each include a list of classes students may choose from to meet the requirement. Lastly, you allow 21 credits of open electives where a student can take any class.

Degree Audit Setup

Degree Audit Semester

Appearing on the student’s degree row, this represents the catalog year for a student’s degree requirements and informs the degree audit. Different curricula may apply depending on the semester a student started at your institution. If no degree audit is found for the set semester, Campus Cafe uses the most recent audit not later than the student’s semester. If the audit semester is blank, it defaults to the student's entry semester.

Your math curriculum for students who start in Fall 2024 requires Algebra III. In Fall 2025 you replace this requirement with Calculus I. To ensure students receive a correct degree audit, students who started in Fall 2024 have a degree audit semester of Fall 2024. Those who started in Fall 2025 have a degree audit semester of Fall 2025.

Degrees/Majors

Degree level

The categorization of the degree tied to the major. A student’s class enrollments can be grouped by degree level.

You offer undergraduate and graduate programs. A student participated in both programs at your institution. You want classes the student took as part of their undergraduate degree to appear separately on their transcript from those classes that were part of the graduate degree so you set up two degree levels: UG and GR. The student then has separate cumulative credit totals and GPAs for their undergraduate and graduate programs.

Academic degrees

Degree status

The status of a student in their academic major such as enrolled or conferred. These statuses are delivered by Campus Cafe and can’t be changed. You can use Filters and reports to find students in specific status(es) such as to find all students who graduated last semester.

Keith is enrolled in classes without final grades. His status is Enrolled. When grades are submitted, Campus Cafe changes his status to Active. When he finishes all his degree requirements, the Registrar’s Office changes his status to Conferred to officially graduate him.

Degrees/Majors

Document portal

A way for students to see tasks you require of them and/or upload requirement information. The tasks shown are activity tracking templates you’ve assigned to students. Don’t use this for applicants, instead use the admissions portal and required documents.

You want to collect vaccination information from your current students so you create an activity tracking template called Vaccination Records and assign it to your students. Students then upload their vaccination record and the task is marked as complete.

Document portal

Filter (Finder)

A way to search for many individuals at once. Campus Cafe delivers finders for prospective students, applicants, students, parents, faculty, constituents and organizations. You can also use filters to find activity tracking templates assigned to people and financial aid data associated with students.

You use the Student Filter to find all students from Rhode Island who are journalism majors.

Activity tracking

People filters

Student filter (Finder)

Filters: Base case examples

General ledger

Your financial “books” or accounting record of your institution. If you use Campus Cafe as your accounting system, this contains all your financial information.

Your ledger contains accounts for tuition received and for expenses related to credit card transactions.

General ledger

Gift

A cash or non-cash donation to your institution. You can tie gifts to specific initiatives.

Sally McBride gives your institution $1,000 to support a new basketball court.

Record gift

Group billing

Once you’ve created billing rules, you must run group billing to apply the charges to students. One you run group billing, the charges appear in bill batch for posting to student ledgers.

You create tuition rules to bill students different rates depending on their major. You’re ready to assess charges to students so you run group billing.

Group billing

ISIR

The Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) is an electronic federal output document produced by the U.S. Department of Education’s Central Processing System (CPS) containing the data the student put on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). An ISIR is required to generate an accurate financial aid package for a student if the student is seeking federal aid.

A student submits a FAFSA for next academic year. You download the ISIR so you can package their student loans, Pell Grant and other federal aid.

Download ISIRs

Ledger card

The student ledger card shows all billing and payment transactions associated with a student’s account. Charges and payments must be posted through bill batch or cash batch prior to showing on the ledger.

A student’s ledger shows tuition, fees and housing costs for the fall semester. It also shows they made a credit card payment and received a Pell grant.

Student ledgers

Major

An academic program that may or may not lead to a degree. Although Campus Cafe calls them “majors,” they may include minors, concentrations, non-degree programs or other academic offerings.

You offer a journalism major and minors in math and cultural studies.

Academic programs (majors)

OpenAPI

Using an application program interface (API) you can retrieve specific information from Campus Cafe or input information into Campus Cafe. This is how you build a connection between Campus Cafe and another system. Campus Cafe only supports the transfer of specific information, mostly related to individuals interested in applying to your institution.

You want a third-party admissions leads generation software to automatically create in Campus Cafe people interested in applying to your institution.

Admissions OpenAPI (REST JSON)

Permissions

Control what specific people can see and do in Campus Cafe. Each Campus Cafe user has a single permission group. Each group has access to specific functions within one or more modules. Each function has a unique number. A function can be NA for no access, RO for read only or blank meaning access is allowed.

You don’t want your students to see a FERPA message every time they log in so you set permission #446 in the Global module to NA. However, for administrators you don’t set this to NA because you want them to see this message each time they log in.

Permissions

Plan of Study

A way for students to map out the classes required to graduate. You can create a template of courses students must take and in what order. Students can modify the plan to their unique needs and track their progress toward graduation.

You want your math majors to know they should take MTH101, MTH 104 and 2 General Education Classes their first semester. You follow this with the requirements for each semester thereafter.

Set Up Individual Plan of Study

Project expense tracking (PET)

You have expenses and revenue tied to a specific initiative, activity or program. Using project expense tracking (PET), Campus Cafe lets you track these expenses so you can later group or roll them up to a single total.

You want to track all donations and expenses associated with the construction of a new basketball court.

Project Expense Tracking (PET)

Queue results

A way for one activity tracking template to trigger another activity tracking template.

An admissions recruiter calls an applicant who doesn’t answer. When the recruiter indicates there’s no answer, you want Campus Cafe to automatically place another another activity to remind them to call the applicant in three days.

Queue results

Semester

A period of time that defines when you offer district academic programming. You may call it a term, quarter, trimester or another term. This period of time often aligns with your student loan payment periods. While you can change “semester” to a phrase of your liking in many places, Campus Cafe may use semester for some functions and documentation typically refers to semester.

Fall 2025 term, Spring 2026 quarter, Summer 2026 trimester.

Semesters

Session data

Academic and financial information about a student for a specific semester (academic period). This information can change over time so Campus Cafe creates a new session record for each semester so you don’t lose historical information. You can use information on student session data such as resident code, site, billing rule code and part time code to control how the student is billed and awarded financial aid.

Their first semester (fall), a student opts for a meal plan with 20 meals a week. Their second semester (spring), they move to a meal plan with 15 meals a week. Their fall semester data records the 20 meal plan, their spring semester the 15 meal plan.

Student session data

Site

Campus Cafe lets you create sites for admissions, academic and financial purposes. Sites let you track students or others by site and also let you set up different course registration or billing rules. You can also use sites when you create activity tracking templates to change how they behave based on the individual’s site.

You create different academic sites for your East and West campuses so you can track students by site and also limit students to registering for classes only at their own campus. You also create different billing (financial) sites for each campus and another for evening Continuing Education students because they have unique billing rules.

Sites

SSO

Single sign on. This is a software that lets people have one username and password to access multiple distinct systems.

Campus Cafe supports SSO using Microsoft Azure or Google Workspace.

Sponsor

An individual or organization that will pay some or all of a student’s charges.

The Pease Corp. plans to pay tuition for a group of employees attending your theater program.

Create sponsor organization

STParm

An option shown on a menu. Each STParm consists of a Parameter Code that identifies the menu and a Parameter Value that identifies the option.

Tell Campus Cafe your semesters and how they should display. For example 201910 might be Fall 2018.

STParms

Transaction code

Transaction codes categorize charges and payments. They also tie back to a specific general ledger account.

You have a transaction code for tuition and another for technology fees. They flow to different accounts on your general ledger.

Transaction codes

Web app config

Where you configure the details of how integrations (other software) work with Campus Cafe

You enter the details of your Stripe account so you can accept credit card payments from students

Workflow

Used as part of an activity tracking template, the workflow executes a specific task in Campus Cafe when the activity tracking template is assigned.

You create an activity tracking template instructors can use to flag an at-risk student. The workflow in the activity tracking template triggers an email to the individual at your institution tasked with helping at-risk students.

Workflows