Students and/or Business Office seeing pending financial aid

Ben Bishop
Ben Bishop
Fourth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ General Discussions

We have to hand calculate the net cost for students (Charges - pending aid) manually involving two different offices. This is leading to a lot of student and parent frustration - who want to pay early. Is there a way using the system to show students and/or the Business Office module what aid is pending so students can pay correctly before aid is applied?

This is an issue that I have seen in the discussion board a bunch (enhancement BBEM-I-338 and https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/561/62644). I wanted to see if any progress was made on this frustrating issue.

The BlackBaud system has all the needed information so ideally in the students/parents mind this should be easy.

Has anyone figured out how to do this yet?

Comments

  • Dale Cecil
    Dale Cecil
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Ben Bishop We have not figured out any way to do this other than time-consuming manual calculations. It is really frustrating how many new manual processes we have to had to put in when we “upgraded” to BEM from Student Billing. You would think they would have kept some of the basic functionality of Student Billing but instead we are constantly manually changing general ledge accounts since it won't recognize multiple cash accounts nor will it allow us to use the tuition accounts that Student Billing did. I would much rather have Student Billing than the forced BEM “upgrade”

  • Dawn Alonso
    Dawn Alonso
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Ben Bishop

    Hi Ben,

    I am the one who posted the initial discussion referenced here.

    I will say, that if you go to the trouble of putting the anticipated aid into the system, which can be done with a bulk upload. there will be a spot in student billing for the parents/student to see the anticipated aid and what it does to their total. Look at the account summary to the right.

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    Mind you, this does not affect their total due, it will still show up as the full amount. But they can see on the right how the aid will affect what they have to pay.

    We transitioned to using the bulk upload for Financial Aid and it is a game changer. Both in that you can put anticipated aid on and then the awarded and it is simply an excel spreadsheet, which is how we receive our rosters anyway.

    The reason anticipated aid can't affect the balance is because there is not credit generated until it is awarded, actually logical if inconvenient.

  • Dale Cecil
    Dale Cecil
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Dawn Alonso problem is that the Business Offie cannot see that unless we impersonate every single student individually. There needs to be a way to see this on our side. Even if there was a report we could run, that would help. In the old Student Billing, this was shown right on the student account or you can run reports/queries.

  • Dawn Alonso
    Dawn Alonso
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Dale Cecil-If you are in the student account, the Pending Financial Aid would show in the Financial Aid tab. Yes, that would mean that if a parent calls and asks you would manually have to figure it out. But the information as to what they truly owe is available to them in the right hand account summary, if your school is so inclined, they can pay based off of the account summary number.

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  • Dale Cecil
    Dale Cecil
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Dawn Alonso Yes it is there. It is just a shame it now requires manual calculations where it did not before we were forced to “upgrade”. And there is no way to run reports or queries on the pending aid. Just hate that BEM requires more manual processes and calculations than Student Billing.

  • Dawn Alonso
    Dawn Alonso
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Dale Cecil-I get it but from a “self-service” standpoint as was the original question, the information is available to the families.

  • Ben Bishop
    Ben Bishop
    Fourth Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Thanks but not quite (I want to be picky ?).

    Knowing that there will be pending guidance from the Feds (I work in Financial Aid at an IHL) it is highly recommended (soon to be required) that federal aid cannot be presented as lump sums in systems/award offers. Instead, it should be listed as type. - that way loans are not automatically accepted (even though there are things in place federally to stop that already). In the same way, I don't want a student/parent to pay a net balance if a lump aid amount contains both pending grant and pending loan aid (if they don't want loans). We give a lot of estimates but they are manual, so I was hoping for something more automatic-ish.

    If there was a way the student side could see a breakdown of each aid item per semester that indicated as pending and then applied (or whatever terms) that would be great. I send a manual report to our Business Office for them to use, but a system report for them too would be useful for statement generation for accurate early student net payment.

    I may be wishing for the moon, but something like that (on the student side and/or Business Office side), it would really help our population.

  • Dale Cecil
    Dale Cecil
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Ben Bishop This was available in the old Student Billing but that option does not exist in BEM.

  • Dawn Alonso
    Dawn Alonso
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Ben Bishop I know our students have their Award letters uploaded into Blackbaud, which they can see by dropping down to see their forms. That is the only way that right now they can see what the individual pieces are prior to awarding.

    I know our financial aid office knows what the student is getting by being able to see things in the state and federal system, that is how the award letters are generated. I know what they receive once I have a roster to post what is awarded, unless I look at the Anticipated Financial Aid on a student's record, which is updated by Financial Aid. Again, the key part is that the Business office is not going to be able to see anything affect a total until a credit is generated, the absolute piece of accounting.

  • Barbara Stundon
    Barbara Stundon
    Name Dropper First Anniversary Facilitator 1

    @Ben Bishop
    Thanks for noting that it will soon be a Federal requirement to list the federal aid, as the old system does. We've requested this feature and heard from BB that this feature should be released by the end of April.

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