Budgets (Settings)

Path

Main Menu - Settings - Institution - Financial Aid - Budgets

Purpose of this Form

The Budgets form enables financial aid administrators to create and manage student budgets to be assigned. On this form, you can define specific costs associated with various living situations by campus.

Use Case Example

A financial aid administrator is preparing for the upcoming academic year and needs to configure budgets for undergraduate students living on campus. Using this form, the administrator creates a budget that includes tuition, room and board, transportation, and other allowable expenses. This budget will be used to determine each student’s financial need and aid eligibility.

Configuration Considerations

Users' access to Budges is managed under Settings – Organization – Roles – Access Rules – Configuration Menu – Financial Aid - Budgets. 

Understanding the Form

The Budgets form displays a list of existing budget configurations, the amount of their Pell COAs, and whether or not they are enabled for use in Student First.

If you’d like to create a new budget, click the Add New button to access the fields above and populate them for your new budget. To copy an existing budget, click on the row of any existing budget, which will highlight the row, and then click Copy. You’ll see a new budget created with the same name as the original budget appended with “-COPY”.

When creating a new budget configuration, there are two sections to populate – the configuration section and the Cost Details section.

In the Configuration section, name your budget and assign it a code (which is used during internal Student First processing). You can also set an automatic Pell COA value to be used for Pell calculations when a student is assigned this budget. Finally, list the campuses that this budget configuration applies to.

In the Cost Details section, set up your cost items for each type of student living situation – On Campus, At Home, or Off Campus. When you select one of those tabs, your current list of cost items shows. Click on an existing item or click Add New to set up the item name, type, cost and whether it counts as an institutional cost. The values in the Cost Types dropdown are delivered with Student First. They represent the cost types defined in the Federal Student Financial Aid Handbook.

Once you’ve populated all needed fields, set the configuration to be active in Student First.

You can assign active budgets to individual students via the Academic Years form (Student Menu – Financial Aid – Academic Years). On that form, you also assign a living situation so the system knows which living situation tab’s cost items to use. You can also override the budget’s default Pell COA on the Academic Years form, as well as add or remove cost items.

Note: Batch assignment of budgets is planned in the near future.