Testing and Validating Your PowerFAIDS Build

As a final step to complete the onboarding process for PowerFAIDS, you will work with your migration specialist to validate your configurations through a series of testing activities. All testing will be completed using your PowerFAIDS Sandbox environment.

At the onset of your PowerFAIDS migration activities, you were asked to identify a student population group to work with throughout your configuration sessions. This is the population group that will be used during these testing sessions.

A quick review of standard administrative setup will be completed prior to beginning testing and validation.

Institutional Prerequisites and Responsibilities

At least 1 week prior to the first scheduled testing and validation session, each of the following items must be completed:

  1. Ensure all Migration Setup Phase tasks are complete for your chosen student population group.
  2. Download the sample ISIR file.
  3. The PowerFAIDS Sandbox Refresh must be set to complete at least 1 day prior to testing sessions.

Testing and Validation Session

The following is an outline of the typical testing progression your migration specialist will lead you through, to be completed in an updated version of your PowerFAIDS Sandbox environment:

Your migration specialist will provide sample files and assist you in creating and updating student records by:

  1. Loading (sample) ISIR files through the ISIR Import.
  2. Importing (sample) student information files through the Student Information Import.

Your migration specialist will assist you in retrieving a sample population of student records included in the files imported in Step 1 to review student level data including:

  1. Adding academic years to student records.

    Update student records to include assignment of an academic year and program.

  2. Adding payment periods and scheduled disbursement dates.
    1. Add payment periods to student records.
    2. Populate any needed detail to custom data or other fields that drive cost of attendance.
  3. Reviewing institutional & Pell Grant cost of attendance items.

    Review test student records to ensure the correct institutional and Pell Grant cost of attendance are assigned to the student based on data populated on the record.

  4. Reviewing requirement association.
    1. Evaluate the association of requirements that are populated on the student record to ensure assignment is working as desired.
    2. Analyze tracking status assigned to the student record based on completed or outstanding requirements.
  5. Reviewing funds and packaging fund attributes.
    1. Add awards to student records and review the details at the student level.

    2. Overview the attributes on the award at the student level and discuss the correlation of fund attribute configurations (scheduled disbursement date, fund distribution, etc.).

  6. Generating communications.

    Using the communication templates developed during configurations, generate a sample Financial Aid Offer communication and a sample Outstanding Requirements communication based on attributes within the student record.