About manual financial aid awards

You can use Campus Cafe’s automated packaging to award students aid based on certain criteria. However, you may have circumstances unique to individual students where you need to manually add or adjust an award. For example, perhaps you have a student who wins a competitive merit award, the Presidential Scholarship, offered to only one student a year and you need to place that award on the student’s account.

Prerequisites

• Create semesters.

• Create financial aid award codes.

• Create disbursement rules for the award code.

Required permissions

Video tutorial

Award aid

1. Go to the student’s profile.

2. Go to Person Selected > F/A Transactions.

3. In Award Code select the award (e.g. Presidential Scholarship).

4. Select the Award Year, usually the calendar year of the last term in the academic year. For example, Fall 2023 would belong to the 2024 aid year.

5. Under Disb #1 in Semester select the semester (payment period) in which to apply the award.

6. In Start/Scheduled Date, optionally select the first disbursement date.

   • If the selected semester is set up under the Semester Date Maintenance Campus Cafe auto fills this date with the starting date of the semester. You can override this date.

   • If the date field is left blank Campus Cafe defaults to today’s date.

   • If using/creating a payment plan, the start/schedule date will determine the first payment date for the payment plan.

     • If using the payment plan override option when creating a payment plan, the start date will be the payment day for each sequential month.

7. If applying non-federal aid such as institutional scholarships, you may leave the AY#, Academic Yr Begin, Acad Yr End, Pay Per. Start and Pay Per. End dates empty.
   If applying a federal award (e.g. subsidized or unsubsidized Federal Stafford Loans or Pell Grants) processed through COD origination/disbursement functions in Campus Cafe, then you must fill in the following:

   • AY# is the Academic Year the disbursement will be packaged under. If left blank it will default to AY 1.

   • Acad Year Begin and End Date: Determine the Academic Year dates the first disbursement will fall into. For term-based schools this usually is the same date period as the Award/Loan Period begin and end dates, which will appear of the page following once you click Add.

   • Pay Period Start Date: This date is the payment period starting date, which is usually the start date of the student's first class within the disbursement's specified term.

   • Pay Period Ending Date: This date is the payment period ending date, which is usually the end date of the student's last class within the disbursement's specified term.

8. Optionally, to add additional disbursements, click Add Disbursement and repeat steps 5-7 under Disb #2. You would do this if you want to disburse - apply the award to the student’s bill - in multiple parts. For example, maybe you want to apply the first part of the Presidential Scholarship at the start of the semester and the remainder at the end once you’ve reviewed the student’s grades.
   
   Adding additional disbursements will split the total award amount among the created disbursements.
   
   

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9. Click Add to create the award.

   • Details of the award appear.
     Status: Indicates the status of the award. The status impacts how the award appears on a student bill.

   • Award Amount: The total amount of all scheduled disbursements within the award (regardless if they have been disbursed or not). Adjustments to Federal Award total amounts created through the Auto Packaging tool should be made to the disbursements directly through the scheduled disbursements page.

   • Comment 1: A note related to the award.

   • Award Year: The financial aid year associated with the award.

   • PLUS APP ID: Manually set the PLUS Loan application ID to be used for Origination and Disbursement of the award.

   • Award/Loan Period From Date: The date indicating the start of the award/loan period (needed for COD origination on the Disbursement Roster).

   • Award/Loan Period To Date: The date indicating the end of the award/loan period (needed for COD origination on the Disbursement Roster.
     
     Note that Academic Year Begin and End Dates are set on the individual Scheduled Disbursements.

10. Click Save.

Correcting COD export errors

If you originate or disburse federal aid to COD through the Disbursement Roster and the award is missing either dates for the Academic Year or the Award Year, you will receive an export error. You can review if awards are missing these dates by scrolling to the far right on the disbursement roster page. If dates are missing you can manually add these dates.

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If you successfully originate and disburse at least one disbursement, and then change the Award or Academic Dates after that first disbursement is released, it may cause a break between Campus Cafe and COD. The government may reject the second disbursement because it may expect the dates that were originally used in the first origination/disbursement. In these cases, we suggest changing the dates to the original amounts and re-export to COD. Then manually adjust the dates after the final disbursement in COD and Campus Cafe to match.