COVID 19 Best Practices for Financial Aid Management

Derek Nichols

We're in uncharted and uncertain times. Typical ways of doing things have had to change as we all adapt to a new way of life. With that in mind, here are a number of best practices for working with Financial Aid Management during the pandemic.With COVID-19 changing the world around us, we know our schools need to adapt to the new lives your families are leading. In many cases, parents are experiencing job loss or lost hours at work which means that more families will most likely need financial aid for the upcoming school year. We have some suggested best practices for schools to make the financial aid process easier for families to complete.

Relax deadlines and required docs

Our first suggestion is to relax your school’s financial aid deadline. If your school has a strict deadline set, you can edit this in Deadlines under Settings. Use the dropdown to select Loose and then select the Edit icon to set a date and select applicable school levels. We also suggest being more flexible about required documents. Families are stuck home right now and may not have access to printers, scanners, and fax machines. They may be unable to get you appropriate documentation due to the current climate.

Switch from parent pay to school pay

If your school is setup for parents to pay the application fee, your school can elect to change to School pay for this setting. This setting can be found under General School Settings. If your school would like to make a change to this setting, you will need to create a support ticket in Case Central from within Smart Aid.


A Smart Aid Specialist will follow up once the setting is changed.

Adjust custom questions

Schools can add or update their Custom questions for the application. Any new questions will be added to the application for new applicants that have not submitted an application. Previously submitted applicants will have blank answers for these questions on any School Reports. This allows schools to ask families new questions based on the current worldwide pandemic. Schools could denote these questions with COVID to differentiate them from your core custom questions.

Review/Re-review ‘as is’ apps

Schools may need to review applications as they currently are because parents may not have access to the needed resources to complete them (much like with relaxing required document standards). Additionally, schools may need to re-review applications because in some cases, financial information for families has drastically changed. You can update application details for families through Manage families. Simply select the Parent/Guardian name then select the blue tab and finally, use Application details to update application information. You will need to regenerate the family report after you make any edits here.

Missing docs report

Schools can use the Missing documents report to see any missing documentation families may have. This will allow you to decide what documentation family still needs to turn in and if there is any documentation that is missing that they could realistically not turn in and still receive financial aid.

Budgets and Awards

Finally, schools will need to update their budgets and awards as needed for families needing financial aid. We recommend creating a tracking budget specific to awards given due to COVID-19. A tracking budget does not require you to set a budget amount and you can award from the budget as needed. This will allow schools to track any additional aid that was given out to families due to the current pandemic and will keep the amount awarded for COVID-19 separate from the amount awarded year over year.

COVID-19 Special Circumstances

Finally, with our most recent release, we have added a new Special Circumstances checkbox specifically for COVID-19. When a family is completing their application, they will want to mark this box on the Special Circumstances page in order to let your school know they are applying for aid due to COVID-19.


We hope these tips offer a bit of clarity and helpfulness as you adjust to this new way of doing things. We hope you're all doing well, staying safe, and most importantly, staying healthy. We'll get through this together. See you next week.