Our new financial release gives Financial Aid its own General Settings section and introduces some new, more flexible workflows. Here's a look:

Refunds

A new setting now lets Student Billing and Financial Admin users refund financial aid to students. When you check Yes on the new setting, the Refund to Student workflow is folded in under your options in the new Refund Credit Balance workflow on Profile > Financial > Dashboard. An additional new setting lets you configure your Aid Refund Policy—if you need to combine aid refunds with regular credit balance refunds, for example, you now have that option.

The new setting is a one-way, opt-in setting; once you enable it, you're upgraded to the new, improved workflow (for keeps!). It's a considerable improvement to the old batch workflow, and it will definitely take some work off your Financial Aid department's desk. Read about it in the Populi Knowledge Base.

Refund Credit Balance

With all this talk of a new Refund Credit Balance workflow, we thought it'd be helpful to tell you what we're talking about.

Formerly, non-aid refunds to students were handled as an outgoing payment. There were some problems with this. For starters, most folks didn't think to look for the refund workflow under the Record Payment option. It also only let you refund regular payments—it didn't touch aid refunds to students, which are handled by many schools' student billing departments.

The new Refund Credit Balance option now appears whenever the student has something refundable—an unapplied payment or credit, or unapplied aid (if you've updated the aforementioned setting). The steps are just the same as the old workflow, with numerous provisions for the Aid Refund Policy setting. It's more intuitive, and what's more, the option only appears in the actions menu if there's something refundable on the student's account. It's an improvement not just for Financial Aid, but your Student Billing office as well. Read more about the new Refund Credit Balance workflow.

Batch workflow order

The Disbursement batch workflow setting lets you specify which comes first: disbursing aid to students or drawing down the funds from the aid source. If your school is required to disburse-then-draw-down for Federal aid awards, you can now set up your batch workflow to follow the same steps in the same order you do.