About financial aid control

Financial aid (F/A) control lets you determine how financial aid works within Campus Cafe, including what aid is visible to students. You can configure financial aid control by site giving you flexibility to operate financial aid differently depending on site. For example if you have multiple campuses and aid is awarded differently at each.

Settings here work in tandem with the packaging process to award financial aid.

Campus Cafe supplies updated Pell and Subsidized and Unsubsidized (Stafford) loan schedules.

Prerequisites

• Gather your institution’s U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education Identification (OPE ID) number and any branch numbers.

• Gather your institution’s U.S. Department of Education’s Federal School Code. This is the code students put on a FAFSA to have it sent to your institution.

• To set an aid year as the current year, at least one semester within the aid year must exist. For example, for the 2024-2025 aid year to appear, you need to create at least Fall 2024.

• Create degree sites using STParm SBCONO. A site is required for each unique COD/FAFSA/Routing/Pell ID assigned to your institution by the federal government.

• Create admissions forms that will process ISIRs from individuals who don’t already exist in Campus Cafe.

Required permissions

ISIR import behavior

If you plan to import ISIRs, you may find some ISIRs are for individuals who don’t already exist in Campus Cafe. By default, Campus Cafe puts these students in the holding table for your review. You can tell Campus Cafe to instead disregard these ISIRs, which will also disable any notifications associated with the ISIR.

1. Go to Admin > Custom Control.

2. Click the pencil.

3. In Parameter Value 1 enter Y.

4. Click Save.

Add control

Each site has its own control. This lets you ensure that your financial aid settings align with each site’s unique business processes. Sites can by physical like multiple campuses or programmatic like day and evening programs. A site is required for each unique COD/FAFSA/Routing/Pell ID assigned to your institution.

Each site has exactly one control.

1. Go to Financials > F/A Control.

2. In Add Site select a site.

   Open

   

3. Click Add Control.

   Open

   

4. In Site Name optionally enter a description of the site. For example Downcity Campus. This is informational only and isn’t used in any financial aid processing.

5. Configure your settings starting with selecting a financial aid provider.

Select a financial aid provider

The financial aid provider lets Campus Cafe know where it gets and sends student financial aid data.

1. In Export-Import Provider select your provider.

   • COD Service Provider retrieves data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) system via Institutional Student Information Records (ISIRs). If you select this option, Campus Cafe delivers student loan origination fees that are set during the awarding process.

   • ECM Service Provider connects to third-party financial aid processing company Educational Compliance Management (ECM). (You must contract directly with ECM for this service.)

   • None means you’ll manually award financial aid based on data and calculations outside of Campus Cafe.

2. Click Save.

Enter U.S. Department of Education identifying information

This lets Campus Cafe properly handle ISIRs and COD transmissions.

1. In Federal OPE-ID# enter your institution’s six-digit OPE ID and the two-digit branch number for eight digits total. The branch number must align with the site. If you don’t have branches, enter 00 for the branch number.

2. In Federal FICE# / FAFSA School Code enter your institution’s six-character Federal School Code. This is the code applicants and students put on a FAFSA to have it sent to your institution.

3. When you receive an ISIR for a person already in Campus Cafe, the platform matches the ISIR with the person. You need to tell Campus Cafe how to handle an ISIR for a new person. You do this by selecting in ISIR App Config an admissions form. This allows you to have different inquiries forms/notification emails by site.

4. Click Save.

Example

Here we configure site 3, our Downcity Campus, to send and receive information from COD using OPE-ID 00340900 and Federal School Code 003409. ISIRs not automatically matches to students will be processed using the Downcity Inquiry admissions form.

Enter COD identifying information

If you’re using COD as your service provider, you must tell Campus Cafe how to identify your institution to the federal government’s Common Origination and Disbursement (COD) system.

You must set up COD identifying numbers for each unique campus/site.

Find your COD information

If you don’t know your institution’s COD information, you can look it up in COD.

1. Log in to COD.

2. Click School to search for schools. Enter the full registered name of your school or type the entity ID and click Search.

3. Once found, click the red info icon next to the site you would like see.

4. The first 4 IDs you’ll need to enter in Campus Cafe.

Enter information in Campus Cafe

1. In COD Direct Loan ID enter your institution’s direct loan ID.

2. In COD Pell ID enter your institution’s Pell ID.

3. In COD Routing ID enter your institution’s routing ID.

4. Click Save.

Example

Input ECM Campus identifying information

This step is only required if you’re using Educational Compliance Management (ECM) as your third-party financial aid processor.

1. In ECM Campus Code enter your ECM number provided by ECM.

2. Click Save.

Set semester controls

A control must be set for students to see verified or pending awards on their ledgers (billing statements).

1. In Current Semester select your currently active semester.

2. In Statement F/A View Semester select the semester of the awards to show on a student's statement.
   This must be the semester furthest out in the future that is desired to be displayed. For example, if you want to show Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 awards on the student's billing statement, you must select Spring 2025. This field will also affect the Pending/Verified aid fields on the student finder.

3. In Payment Page F/A View Semester select the semester of the awards to show on when a student is making an online payment. Selecting a semester is helpful for institutions that bill for a full year, but only want to show the current semester on the student's statement.

4. In Current Year select the award year to display by default when financial aid staff review a student’s record. This selection also determines the year’s data shown on the student profile's financial aid status tabs.

5. In Current Packaging Semester select the default semester that Financial Aid Document Tracking Member uses when tracking activities are added manually. Documents triggered by an ISIR will be added according to the year of the ISIR.

6. In Highest Billing Semester select a semester. On the Student Finder's amount due column only billing charges for this semester and prior will show. Choose semester 999999 to display charges for all semesters.

7. In On-Campus Res Code and Off Campus Res Code tell Campus Cafe how to process the housing component of a student’s cost of attendance. Starting with the 2024-2025 aid year, ISIRs don’t contain student housing information so Campus Cafe will look to a student’s most recent session data to determine if they plan to live on or off campus.

   • On-Campus Res Code: Select the code that indicates a student plans to reside in institutional housing. Campus Cafe treats students with this code as on campus for cost of attendance calculations regardless of the student’s ISIR dependency status.

   • Off-Campus Res Code: Select the code that indicates a student plans to reside off campus. Campus Cafe selects off campus for a student the ISIR designates as independent. If a student is listed as a dependent student then “With Parents” is automatically selected.

8. Click Save.