Packaging

PowerFAIDS is built on the assumption that aid should go to those who need it, while also allowing you to award aid based on other criteria such as academic accomplishment or entitlement. In support of this assumption, PowerFAIDS offers a wide variety of packaging approaches to support your institution's financial aid policies and administration of federal, state, and private aid programs.

Because creating student aid packages is the culmination of the entire financial aid process, you will need to set up most of the other features in the application before beginning the packaging process. The product map shown below lists the features from top to bottom that need to be set up before initiating packaging:

Once you have completed the setup of these other features, you can begin packaging student records. There are two ways to package student records: manual packaging and automated packaging. Both methods can be done individually for specific students, or in batch to package groups of students at a time.

Manual Packaging

On the student Aid Package, you have the option to add, update, or delete awards manually rather than using a packaging formula. When you package manually, PowerFAIDS runs eligibility checks to ensure students do not exceed their cost of attendance, need, annual award limits, aggregate (lifetime) award limits, and more, unless you specify otherwise.

Some benefits of manual packaging include:

• Ease of use: Packaging manually is a simple process that doesn't require the setup of packaging formulas, so it can be helpful to first become familiar with manual packaging before moving on to more complex, formula-based packaging.

• Flexibility for unique circumstances: Manually updating awards on the Aid Package page gives you more flexibility to make on-the-spot decisions about specific students. There may be times when you need to override your standard institutional rules for a student, in which case manual packaging is a good option.

  Caution: While manual packaging gives you total control and flexibility over awarding, it is also more prone to clerical errors than automated packaging. Additionally, federal eligibility requirements are maintained during manual packaging; however, other rules you may have placed on your funds or within a packaging formula will not be enforced. For this reason, it is important that you exercise caution and maintain institutional policy when manually packaging a student.

• Ability to add multiple awards from one fund: When packaging manually, you can add more than one award from the same fund to the aid package for the same academic year, provided the amount doesn't exceed federal rules. This is sometimes necessary in unique situations. For example, if a student first borrows less than their full loan eligibility and later wants to borrow more funds, you will need to add multiple awards from that same fund to that student's aid package, as seen in the image below:

  

  As you can see, these awards are displayed separately on the aid package, even though they are awarded from the same fund. When this information is gathered to create the student’s award offer, they will be combined into one line.

For detailed instructions on how to manually package a student, see Packaging a Student Manually.

PowerFAIDS also offers the ability to add a single award to a group of students. Please see Add Awards for more information.

Automated Packaging

In addition to manual packaging, you can also award students based on one of your institution's defined packaging formulas with automated packaging. You can initiate automated packaging for an individual student from the Aid Package page in their student record, or you can package an entire population of students from the Batch Processing module.

There are many benefits to using automated packaging, including:

• Equity across student subpopulations – Because packaging formulas are created once and then applied consistently to the student records that fall into their criteria, using packaging formulas allows consistent application of the same packaging rules across groups of students and eliminates potential for manual errors.

• Flexibility over granular details – When you set up your packaging formulas, you will specify the behavior of the overall formula, while also having precise control over crucial details of each fund's eligibility and prioritization within that formula.

• Efficiency of the packaging process – Once created in System Administration, packaging formulas automate the rest of your packaging process, making it quicker than manually packaging aid one award at a time.

• Ability to run packaging simulations: When packaging students in batch, you have the option to run packaging in simulation mode so you can test your packaging formulas and review results to confirm they’re what’s expected before committing any changes to the student record.

For detailed instructions on how to use automated packaging, see Packaging a Student with a Packaging Formula.