Reference: Financial Aid Packaging Glossary

A record containing data such as academic unit, academic level, and program of study for a student that Workday uses to process financial aid for a single academic period.

A packaging period is a collection of 1 or more academic periods that Workday assesses together in the same packaging job.

Award items represent the different types of financial aid at your institution, such as an athletic scholarship or a federal loan.

Student awards represent an awarding of a student award item for a single academic period. Example: An athletic scholarship award of $1000 for a student in the Spring 2026 academic period.

A financial aid award consists of all of the student awards of the same award item that Workday assesses together in the same packaging job run using a single SAI value. In contrast to a student award, which represents a per-period award, a financial aid award reflects the combined total of the student awards a student is eligible for in a packaging period. A financial aid award often spans the same academic periods as its packaging period, however, it may span a smaller subset of those periods.

Example: A packaging period comprises 3 academic periods: Fall, Spring, and Summer. A student is eligible for a State Grant award for only the Fall and Spring periods. The State Grant financial aid award represents award information from both the State Grant student award from the Fall period and the State Grant student award from the Spring period.