Add Awards

One option available in Batch Processing is the ability to add awards to multiple students at a time. When you add an award to a group of students, PowerFAIDS runs the same eligibility checks that occur with manual and automated packaging to ensure students do not exceed their cost of attendance, need, annual award limits, aggregate (lifetime) award limits, and more.

Jump to Workflow Instructions

Some advantages to batch adding awards include:

  • Efficiency of awarding multiple students at once: In just a few steps, you can add awards to entire groups of students, saving you the time and effort of adding the same award to student records individually.
  • Flexibility for distinct circumstances: Adding awards to a group of students using the Batch Process Add Awards function gives you flexibility to make on-the-spot decisions about specific groups of students. For example, if institutional scholarships are decided by a specific department at your school, you can award those students via the batch add award process once recipients have been decided.
  • Access to a detailed results report: Once the add awards process has completed, you can view a detailed results report showing you the outcome of the process, student-by-student, including award amounts and reasons a student was not awarded.

Before Adding Awards in Batch

Because creating student aid packages is the culmination of the entire financial aid application process, you need to set up most of the other features in the application before beginning the add awards process. The product map shown below lists the features from top to bottom that need to be set up before adding an award to a group of students:

Once you have completed setup of these other features, you can begin adding awards to groups of students.

Perhaps your institution's Fine Arts department has a music scholarship awarded to students with exemplary music talent. Here is one way of setting up the system to award those scholarship students using the batch add awards process:

  1. Create a fund for the music scholarship.
  2. Create a Code Lookup custom data field to identify students that are music scholarship recipients by giving the code of Y a description of Yes and the code N a description of No.

    Create custom data field window with field name of Music Scholarship Recipient and field type of code lookup

    Code lookup table with two rows showing a code of Y for a description of Yes and a code of N for a description of No

  3. Update the custom data field you just created on the student records of each scholarship recipient by searching for each student in PowerFAIDS Cloud and manually populating the field, or by performing a student information import and updating the field for all students.
  4. Create a selection set to identify all students who have the music scholarship custom data field set to Yes.

    Selection set titled Music Scholarship Recipients with one rule stating music scholarship recipient field is equal to Yes

  5. Navigate to the Add Awards page in Batch Processing and add the award to the selection set you just created.

    Add Awards page populated to award students in the Music Scholarship selection set for the 22-23 academic year to receive a music scholarship

Adding an Award in Batch

To manually add an award to multiple students, complete the following steps:

  1. Select Batch Processing in the top navigation bar to open the Batch Processing menu along the left side of the page.
  2. Expand the Awards options in the left navigation menu and select Add Awards.
  1. Choose the group of students to whom you want to add this award from the Selection Set list.
  2. Choose the academic year you want to add the award to from the Academic Year list.

    The award year associated with the academic year you choose is displayed in a yellow bar beneath the Fund list.

  3. Choose the fund you want to award from the Fund list.

    The amount of money available in this fund for the associated award year will appear in the yellow bar beneath the Fund list.

    Note: This list contains all funds currently active within the system for the Award Year associated with the selected Academic Year and is not filtered based on an individual student's eligibility.

  4. Indicate whether the status for the awards added from this fund should be Pending or Accepted in the Award Status field.

    Note: The status selected in this field will override the default award status of the fund set in System Administration. For more information on fund settings, see Creating and Editing a Fund.

  5. Enter the Award Amount.

    Tip: Optionally, select Preview Students to view the population prior to running the awarding process. This will show you a list of students in the selection set.

Select Add Awards to commit the update to the students' aid packages.

Note: The add awards process in PowerFAIDS is asynchronous, meaning that you can navigate away from this page to other student records, modules, or pages, or even close PowerFAIDS completely without disrupting the add awards process. Once completed, a message will appear in the top right of the page letting you know the add awards process was completed successfully or that there was a problem, and it was unable to be completed. Either way, a results report is generated with more information.

  1. Select Results Reports at the top right of the Add Awards page.

    Add Awards page shown with the Results Reports button highlighted at the top right of the screen

  2. Select View Report from the rightmost column of the Add Awards Results Reports table for the instance of the process you want to view.

    Results reports table is shown with the rightmost column containing the View Report links highlighted

    A window appears with detailed information on which students were awarded and the award amount, and which students were not awarded and the reason(s) why.

    Add awards results report window

    Tip: There are many customization options available within tables in PowerFAIDS so you can use and organize the data to your liking. This includes rearranging the columns, searching the table, filtering the data, and exporting the table. For more information, see Working with Tables.