Student Financials & Financial Aid Overview

Workday Education

Overview

A crucial part of an institution's student administration involves the fiscal aspects of a student's academic career. Students have a wide variety of financial obligations, such as tuition, books, and lab fees. Students must fulfill these obligations to be considered in good standing with their institution. From an administrative standpoint, you must use careful consideration in configuring how these financial obligations are assigned to students. Make sure to charge your students appropriately, without over or under-charging based on your institution's financial regulations. Additionally, certain students will be eligible for additional tuition or course fees depending on their program of study or institutional entry date.

From a student standpoint, there are several ways to meet these financial obligations. Students pay fees out of pocket, or a student's family or guardian pays tuition and other fees on a student's behalf. Many students also receive financial aid packages, which cover institutional fees, as well as related costs such as housing or books. Although the federal government is typically the source of these financial aid awards, your institution must define the criteria used by the government to calculate how much money to award.

These financial aid and student financials configurations and calculations are vital to your institution and to your students' academic careers. Your institution's student financial management and financial aid management processes and components can be numerous and complex.

In this chapter, you will take a brief look at the features, core components, and functionalities that help you administer your student financial services and financial aid.

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

Identify the features of Workday Student financial aid.

Create a student cost item.

Calculate cost of attendance.

Identify the features of Workday Student financials.

Create a student charge item.

Assess student charges.

Financial Aid Overview

The world of financial aid is very complex. There are federal and state regulations that update regularly. There are many factors that contribute to a student's financial aid offer. There are also many factors in how to manage a student's financial aid selections. In this course, you are taking a very high-level look at these functions.

Workday Student's financial aid functionality allows you to manage a variety of components required to calculate, disburse, and track financial aid for your institution's student population.

You can use Workday Student to manage aspects such as:

Financial aid requirements

Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) Processing

Needs assessments

Award packaging

Distributions

Satisfactory academic progress

Financial Aid Components

Many components make up the financial aid configurations for your institution. Here are some of the core components to keep in mind.

Financial Aid Policy Configurations

There are several policy configurations that contribute to a student's financial aid calculations and packaging. Your institution's financial aid administrators must configure each policy according to federal, state, and institutional regulations. You must ensure that students are receiving the correct amount of financial aid as part of their award packaging.

Attendance Plans

Workday generates Attendance Plans for each student. These plans are based on the underlying financial aid policies and configurations made in your tenant. These attendance plans also serve as a guideline for a student's financial aid and assist both students and administrators in analyzing financial aid information.

Workday uses a student's attendance plan to calculate most COA items. If a student does not have an attendance plan when you calculate COA, Workday will create one.

Cost of Attendance

The Cost of Attendance (COA) represents the estimated costs for a student to attend your institution for a given academic period.

Financial Aid Awards

After all of the financial aid calculations, configurations, and underlying policies are factored, the system derives an actual amount of money, called a financial aid award offer, that the student is eligible to receive. Students have the option to accept or decline individual financial aid awards before receiving any money.

Financial Aid Disbursements

After students have reviewed and accepted financial aid awards, they receive them through financial aid disbursements. Students' financial aid money is sent to the student or added directly to a student's account. Students can use this money to pay for any student charges assessed on their accounts.

Financial Aid Set Up

Financial aid is a complex system that requires a number of configurations before you can effectively manage it in your system. To set up financial aid in your tenant, you need to configure the following aspects of your tenant:

Load Status Policy

Federal Student Aid Rules

Academic Period Type Configuration

Financial Aid Action Items

ISIR Processing

Satisfactory Academic Progress Policy

Student Award Items

Financial Aid Needs Assessment

There are several aspects of the system that calculate financial aid. Now, take a look at each of these aspects.

Load Status Policy

The Load Status Policy defines a student's load status and can affect financial aid eligibility. This policy indicates the minimum number of units a student must enroll in for your institution to consider them a full-time or part-time student. You can use this policy in a number of ways. It can determine a student's load status for financial aid eligibility, and for institution purposes such as tuition calculation and enrollment verification. Access the

View Load Status Rule Set

report to view the Load Status policy.

Federal Student Aid Rules

Federal student aid program policies define the types of financial aid programs that students in an academic unit or program of study are eligible to receive.

The Federal Student Aid (FSA) Program Policy configuration gives you the ability to define what aid programs are relevant to a program of study (or a set of programs). This policy controls what award items are available for packaging later. To configure and maintain federal student aid program policies, use the

Maintain Federal Student Aid Program Policy

task.

Satisfactory Academic Progress Policy

You also need to create a set of Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) standards for receiving financial aid. Students are subject to the SAP policy that you assign to their academic unit and level, or their program of study.

Cost of Attendance

One of the primary drivers of your institution's financial aid configurations is the cost of attendance (COA). Cost of attendance is an estimate of a student's education expenses for one or more academic periods in the same financial aid award year. The COA is essentially a summary of the cost items assigned to a student, such as tuition, book fees, housing, and any other program-specific fees. Workday uses a student's COA to estimate their financial aid award package for need-based awards and merit-based awards that require COA. The cost of attendance is separate from charge items and a student's account does not include cost items.

Before you can begin calculating your student's COA, you need to complete the following in Workday:

Create student cost items.

Assign student cost items.

Create cost of attendance job schedules.

Create cost of attendance reaction policies.

There are a few other components of the COA configuration that you need to plan:

Eligibility Rules: Some of the cost items only apply to a subset of your student population. For example, off-campus boarding fees only apply to students who do not live on campus.

Academic Unit Assignment: Consider which academic units need to use the cost items you create. If subordinate units also use the cost items, assign them to a superior academic unit. Student cost items are inherited down through the academic unit hierarchy structure.

Remember, the COA estimate is not a charge to the student, but rather act as an estimate for financial aid and reporting purposes.

Attendance Plans

Attendance plans enable you to project expected attendance for students, even before they enroll in courses. These plans let you know which academic periods, award years, academic load, and other information to use when calculating cost of attendance, packaging student awards, or generating reports.

Attendance plans automatically generate based on policies assigned to a student's primary program of study on the reporting record. Therefore, to create an attendance plan, make sure that you make the following configurations:

The student's academic unit or program of study has the correct policies assigned, including:

Federal Student Aid Program Policy

Typical Attendance Pattern Policy

Class Standing Policy

Financial Aid Load Status Policy

Standard Academic Progress Policy

Assign an academic calendar to the academic unit's level configuration.

Designate the academic periods considered Summer for financial aid purposes.

Financial Aid Awards

Build your financial aid configurations with the end goal of packaging financial awards and distributing them to your students. You build financial aid award packages for an individual student. These packages can include one or more academic periods in the same financial aid award year at the same time. Workday generates one award package per student per award period and each package contains at least one award or sponsor contract.

The award package contains any relevant financial aid awards and sponsor contracts that the student is eligible for in a given academic period. After creating an award package, you can rerun the packaging process to update it. For example, if there are additional award items created or changed, or if there is a change in the financial aid calculations, you can rerun the packaging process to update the financial aid award package.

Accepting and Declining Awards

Students can use the following method to review their financial aid package and accept their awards:

The Finances application on their homepage.

Students can accept all or part of the award included in the package, or they can decline the entirety of the award. Note that students cannot accept awards after one of the following occurs:

The financial aid award year ends.

The load period for a Federal Direct Loan or Federal PLUS loan ends.

They have declined the award.

Financial Aid Disbursements

After a student accepts an award, Workday disburses it to the student to use for education and related expenses. You can define a disbursement schedule in your system to define the time frame for disbursing student awards and sponsor contracts. Your configurations determine when a student's accepted awards are sent.

Student Nightly Job Orchestration

Workday runs a number of background processes every night in a specific order so that each job can use the latest data from the previous jobs in the orchestration. Some processes run every night. Others run only when you schedule them to. If you have not scheduled a schedulable process to run on a given date, the job orchestration skips to the next process.

You can use the

Student Nightly Job Orchestration Results

report to review information about the all of the jobs in a specific time frame. This report (secured to the Reports: Student Nightly Orchestration domain) enables you to view details about the jobs in the Student nightly job orchestration, such as:

When the job started.

The processing time.

The job status.

The

Student Nightly Job Orchestration Results

report provides visibility into the status and results of the student nightly job orchestration. This enables you to quickly confirm whether a job ran and troubleshoot problems.

Student Financials Overview

Student Financials represents the last step in your student administration. Student Financials features enable you to manage many of your students' fiscal details, including:

Student charges

Student payments

Student waivers

Student refunds

Sponsor contracts

Student Financials Components

The following are core components of student financial services.

Student Charges

All students who attend your institution receive student charges that they must reimburse. These include tuition, meal plans, course fees, and many other aspects of university life.

Charge Items

Charge items represent the individual cost calculations assigned to a student's account. Charge items are associated with a given academic unit or program of study and assigned to student records as needed.

Student Payments

When students or their guardians or proxies pay their student charges, it takes the form of a student payment. You need to be able to record and process these student payments to reimburse your institution's costs.

Student Waivers

Student waivers are discounts provided to qualifying students, which can be based on various criteria such as military status, enrollment in specific courses, or age.

Student Refunds

Students may overpay for their student charges and a negative balance appears on their accounts, requiring a refund. Your need to configure your system needs to handle student waivers and refunds just as it is with student payments.

Student Financials Setup

Before continuing in this area, it is important to note that this class does not cover the setup configurations involved in managing your institution's finances. Instead, you are referencing some of the key financial objects and functionalities that you use to process student charges and payments.

Company Configuration

Before you configure Student Financials, make sure to configure your institution's financial accounting structure. This configuration includes creating accounting journals, which require a company organization. Companies are organizations within Workday that represent the internal business entities within your institution. In Workday Financial Management, companies are the primary organization for all business processes.

As such, you need to create companies that represent the academic units for which you want to post accounting transactions and generate financial reports. When you record student payments, refunds, and other transactions, Workday identifies the company by referencing the academic unit or the superior academic unit for the student's program of study.

Set up the companies that you want to:

Record business transactions.

Produce financial statements.

Create other statutory reports.

Attach at least one academic unit in your academic structure to a company. Workday posts student payments, refunds, and other accounting transactions to the company associated with a student's academic unit. As part of this process, you may need to edit your existing academic units to associate your academic units with the appropriate companies in your system. This step is vital to your student financial management. Use the

Edit Academic Unit

task to edit your existing academic units.

Worktag Balancing and Related Worktags

You also need to ensure that your institution has created and configured accounting worktags to help you track your university's charges and student revenue.

A worktag is a keyword or label representing a business dimension of an enterprise. Workday uses worktags to associate business events and objects with enterprise business dimensions to organize, search, aggregate, and report on system data. Worktags enable you to mark events (transactions) and business objects to make their business purposes clear and classify their common relationships. This gives you a multidimensional view of your business that you can act upon. You can find information easier, filter searches to focus results, and analyze information in aggregated and summarized reporting. You can assign worktags to any line item that generates a financial update (e.g., journal entry lines, supplier invoice lines).

Create and Manage Spend and Revenue Categories

You can use spend and revenue categories when configuring account posting rules. Waiver items and some award items require a spend category. Charge items require a revenue category.

Set Up Settlement and Payment Elections

You need to ensure that you fully configure your institution's settlement process. Doing so allows you to run settlement and settle payments in your system. Likewise, you need to ensure that you have the payment elections configured in your system. Payment election rules for student payments and refunds dictate the methodology for how your institution's financial administration handles student financial transactions.

Student Charges

Student charges represent the various costs, fees, and other amounts charged to students over the course of their academic careers. Your institution decides what items to charge students for, the due dates for charges, and which charges apply to which groups of students based on their academic unit or program of study.

There are a few different components to consider and configure when deciding how to set up your institution's student charges.

Student Charge Items

Each student charge item represents a specific cost that the student incurs and must pay to be eligible for completion of their program of study. When planning your student charge configurations, plan to create a student charge item for every type of charge you want to post to student accounts. These charges can include items such as tuition, housing, or technology fees. Charge items are specific to an academic unit, and can apply to multiple academic levels.

Use the

Create Student Charge Item

task to create a new student charge item. Each charge item is comprised of several options. When creating a student charge item, identify the:

Term	Definition
Type	Group charges for reporting and searching, and for use in payment precedence rules. Workday provides these values.
Classification	1098-T: Make the charge item available in 1098-T tax reporting. Institutional: Make the charge item available for Return of Title IV worksheet calculations. Title IV: You can configure payment precedence rules to give higher priority to charges with this classification.
Revenue Category	Select a worktag to use for aggregate reporting of revenue associated with student charges. Workday also uses it as a dimension in the account posting rule to drive ledger accounting.
Deferred Revenue	Identify charges associated with the charge item as deferred revenue to account for goods and services not fully provided up front, such as tuition. You can recognize the revenue as you provide the goods and services over time. For charge items going straight to revenue, clear the checkbox.
Override Revenue Company	(Optional) To direct revenue to a company that is not associated with the academic unit, select an override revenue company. If you do not select an override revenue company, Workday posts the revenue to the company of the academic unit. You can select a company within the same hierarchy as the company of the institutional academic unit. You can only specify override revenue companies for charge items associated with institutional academic units. You cannot edit this field after transactions exist for the charge item. Example: At your institution, revenue from housing charges belongs to a separate company.
Charge Calculation	Select or create the calculation that computes the charge amount for a student. You can manually enter the amount for a student with the Apply Student Charge task.
Fully Refundable	When selected, you can refund students the full amount when they no longer qualify for the charge item. To prorate student refunds instead, clear the checkbox and define charge adjustment schedules for academic period types.
Due Date Rule	Workday uses this rule to calculate the payment due date. Workday considers charge items included in payment plans past due based on installment due dates rather than the due date rule. Due date rules do not apply when you use the Apply Student Charge task to post a single charge for a student. When you use this task, specify a due date manually.
Exclude from Past Due Hold Consideration Exclude from Registration Soft Drop Consideration	When selected, Workday does not count past due charges associated with the charge item toward holds or soft drops.
Exclude from Student Payment Plans	When selected, students must pay the entire charge amount on its due date, even if they are on a payment plan.

After making all the configurations, you assign student charge items to the specific academic units and programs of study to which they are applicable.

Course Fees

Occasionally, specific courses or course sections have additional fees that students must pay upon registration. You can configure these fees in Workday and include them as student charges to the student's accounts.

Course fees can either be for the course itself, or for additional fees such as for materials. A course and the charge items for its fees must belong to the same academic unit or superior academic unit. If you associate a fee with a course or course section, Workday ignores the calculation rule for charge items when it posts fees.

Assign Student Charge Items

In Workday, use the

Maintain Student Charge Item Assignments

task to assign student charges by the student:

Academic Unit/Academic Level

Program of Study/Program Focus

Ensure that each Academic Unit, Academic Level, and Program of Study have the correct charge items assigned. Doing so ensures that the system assigns new students the correct charges.

You can also mass-apply student charges for:

Late payment fees

Late registration fees

Add fees

Drop fees

Use the Mass Operation Management (MOM) function, Apply Student Charges, to batch-apply manual fees to students based on criteria in a custom report.

Depending on security, once a student has registered and has been charged and then changes their registration, administrators may be able to refresh student charges, using the

Student Financials Account Refresh

refresh button that appears on their Student Financials > Academic Period tab. Students may also be able to refresh student charges on their own (also dependent on security), using the

Student Financials Account Refresh

button that appears on their Student Financials > Transaction summary tab. This button allows students, proxies, and administrators to keep student financial accounts up-to-date with current charges and waivers.

Workday also enables students, administrators, and third-party proxies to view real-time data for student accounts. When enabled, any student financial reaction triggers an immediate update to:

Student charges

Student waiver payments

Account balances

Hold removals

Administrators can enable this feature using the

Maintain Institutional Student Financial Options

task.

Typically, charges will be assigned via Nightly Orchestration but administrators can use the

Run Student Financials Processes By Period

task to manually assign the charges to the student. Here you ensure that the system assigns the appropriate charges correctly to the right students. You select one or more student records to process. You can use this task to:

Package Need Financial Aid

Package Merit Financial Aid

Assign Cost of Attendance Items

Assign Student Charge Items

Note
: Because nightly orchestration runs these jobs nightly, Workday recommends that customers only run these tasks when testing or in production on an exception basis.

Student Payments

As fees and charges get assessed on student accounts, students must make payments. The student payment process is configurable and requires some setup to give your student population the best experience possible.

To process student payments, you need to ensure that your institution has:

Set up online payment options for students.

Created student payment items, such as cash, EFT, or online payment.

After your institution charges students, your institution records the payments to track a student's financial status. You also need to ensure that the mechanisms for depositing student payment revenue are in place for your institution.

Student Payment Plans

Many students require a payment plan to pay their student charges over time instead of all at once. Payment plans allow students to spread out their payments over an academic period. Workday allows you to set up a payment plan policy to determine what charge items to apply a payment plan to. You can also set up a payment plan policy to determine the due date for the scheduled payments.

To enable payment plans, you will need to follow these steps:

Use the

Maintain Academic Period Date Controls

task to configure the payment plan sign-up window,

Use the

Maintain Student Payment Plan Policy

task to complete the set up, and create a student payment plan policy for a specific academic unit and level or program of study.

Note
: When creating charge items in your system, you can select the Exclude from Student Payment Plans checkbox to ensure that a charge item must be paid in full outside of any payment plan.

Set Up Payment Options and Items

When configuring student payment options, you can set up online payments for students. Although this configuration is optional, it is one that many institutions employ and that many students use today. This feature allows you to set up credit card and direct debit options for student payments. Workday supports integrations with third-party payment vendor platforms for credit card and direct debit payments. Alternatively, you can use Workday to process direct debit payments as well.

Use the

Configure Student Payment Options

task to indicate whether your institution accepts credit card payments or direct debit payments. You also indicate how your institution processes these payments.

Selecting an external process means that you are using an external vendor to handle that kind of payment. When students make credit card or direct debit payments through an external processor, Workday routes them to the payment vendor's website to complete the payment. After the student completes the payment, they return to Workday.

Student Payment Items

After you have configured your institution's payment options, you need to create student payment items. These items identify the forms of payment you can accept from students, their parents, and other individuals on behalf of your students. Payment items are specific to an academic unit.

When creating a student payment item, identify the following details:

The name of the payment item (e.g., Online Payment)

The payment method, such as direct debit

The type of receipt generated by the transaction

Whether the payment item is refundable

Whether the payment item is available for use in online payments

A default payment amount, if applicable, which will automatically populate when creating this type of payment item

The precedence group rules for applying the payment to charges in the student's account

Record Student Payments

After a student submits a payment, record that payment in Workday using the

Record Student Payment

task. Here, you record the academic period, payment item, and other details of the payment. Once you have recorded a payment, Workday posts the payment to the student's account and generate accounting entries with worktags. You can view the payment on the Student Financials profile group on the student's profile. If the payment exceeds the charges, the system reports the remaining amount under unapplied payments.

Additionally, use the

Find Student Payment

report to review the payment and view the accounting entries by selecting Accounting, and then View Accounting from the transaction's Related Actions.

Deposit Student Payments

After recording student check payments, your financial administrators also need to process the payment revenue by depositing the payments into a financial account. You can use the

Create Student Deposit

task to create accounting for student payment transactions. You can later use the

Find Student Deposits

report to view completed deposits.

Student Waivers

After you have charged your student population appropriately, there may be times when your institution needs to waive some of your student charges. Student waivers allow you to discount or waive fees for students, which can be based on criteria you define.

Use the

Create Student Waiver Item

task to create a waiver. After creating your waiver, configure the waiver item rule via the

Create Student Waiver Item Rule

task. You can select charge items tied to particular charge types and indicate the percentage that the waiver will cover.

Then, use the

Maintain Student Waiver Item Assignments

task to assign waivers to students based on Academic Unit and Program of Study. Workday only assigns waiver payments to eligible students with a correct academic unit or program of study configuration specified on the assignment policy. You can use the View Student Waiver Item Assignments report to review existing rules.

Once you define the waiver items for your institution, use the

Record Student Waiver Payment

task to manually post waivers to student accounts. The waiver routes for approval according to the business process configuration before you apply precedence rules and create the accounting.

You can use the

Find Student Waivers

report to view the waivers posted to student accounts for an academic period. You can also view the waivers on a student's financial aid package on the student's Financial Aid profile, via the Total Financial Assistance tab. You can adjust manually posted waivers, or even set them to zero.

Student Refunds

There may also be times when your institution needs to refund some of your student charges. Student refunds are a little more straightforward compared to student waivers. Your institution may be required to post refunds for student awards, payments, and sponsor contracts that are configured as refundable. There are two methods of posting student refunds:

You can use the

Create Pending Student Refund

task to issue a refund to a specific student.

You can use the

Generate Pending Student Refunds

task to issue refunds to multiple students. This task also allows you to distinguish whether you are refunding financial aid or student payments.

After you have created one or more student refunds, process it using the

Create Settlement Run

task. This task allows you to print and send out refund checks, or deposit refund amounts through direct deposit. You can also use the

Find Pending Student Refunds

report to view refund details for the company associated with the relevant academic unit.

Chapter 10 Tasks and Reports

Below are the commonly used tasks and reports for the topics covered in this chapter.

Tasks:

Apply Student Charge

Configure Student Payment Options

Create Student Charge Item

Create Settlement Run

Create Student Deposit

Generate Pending Student Refunds

Maintain Student Charge Item Assignments

Maintain Student Payment Plan Policy

Record Student Payment

Record Student Waiver Payment

Reports:

Find Pending Student Refunds

Find Student Deposits

Find Student Payments

Find Student Waivers

Run Student Financial Aid Processes by Period

Run Student Financials Processes by Period

View Academic Period Date Controls