Early in the morning of Friday, August 1, we released a number of upgrades to student billing together with a smattering of  improvements to other areas of Populi. Here's the low-down:

Tuition schedules

We gave tuition schedules some new features and changed how they relate to courses and programs.

• Tuition brackets now let you combine flat rate and per-unit charges. Say you want to charge full-time students $5000 for 12-18 credits and then additional $295 for each credit over 18—you can now do that with one tuition bracket.
• Schedules are no longer linked to academic programs, but rather to individual courses. This lets you get real specific with how you charge your students for particular courses.
• Programs can now have multiple default tuition schedules. So if you have one schedule that charges $500/credit for science courses and another that charges $400/credit for humanities, you can attach both to, say, your Undergraduate Program. Students in the Undergrad program would then get charged according to how many science or humanities courses they enrolled in.

Refunds

Refunds are altogether better and more usable than they used to be:

• Refund policies have been separated from tuition schedules; you now add them directly to student accounts, and they directly govern any automatic refunds the student is to receive.
• Refunds now issue as a simple credit—previously, there was a two-step process involving a full credit and then a new charge for the non-refunded amount.
• You can now limit how far into the term a student is eligible for a refund.

Other assorted student billing items

New fee rules for course delivery method and term name (e.g., the fee only triggers in the Fall term) give you new options for automating fees.

You can now edit the posted date of a transaction at the time that you add it. So, when you invoice charges, you can change the posted date; or when you run a financial aid batch disbursement, you can change the posted date for those transactions. And so on...

IPEDS

The preset IPEDS reports in Academics > Reporting got a couple of nice upgrades.

• We added the Financial Aid survey to the IPEDS Winter Collection.
• We now lets you export IPEDS reports in XML format. This means that you can upload your Populi-generated data directly to NCES—no more copy-pasting of hundreds of rows of numbers from Excel!

Read about all of the week's updates (including bugfixes) in the Release Notes.