How Do Students Get Selected For Budget Building?

Context

UD has automated the budget building process and runs the process in batch. This article walks through how the system knows which students to run initial budgets/subsequent budgets for.

Budget Required Flag

The selection phase of the automated budget process uses a flag on the Maintain Student FA Term page to determine which students should be included in the next run. To check the status for a specific student:

1. Navigate to: Menu > Financial Aid > Financial Aid Term > Maintain Student FA Term.
2. Enter the student’s EMPLID and aid year when prompted.
3. Once inside the student’s record, click the Financial Aid tab at the top of the screen.
4. After the screen refreshes, use the left/right arrows to locate the appropriate term.
5. The Budget Required flag will appear at the bottom of the list.

Students with the flag "Yes - Budget Assign Required" are typically selected for budgets. Once a student's budget has been calculated this field will be updated to "No - Budget Assign Required"

Subsequent Budget Selection

In general there are two ways at UD in which a student could get selected to have their budgets automatically recalculated. 

1. The student had another FA Term built. When a new FA Term is built the budget required flag will switch back to yes. UD currently has census dates set in FA Term setup that will lock FA Term. If the FA Term is locked any material changes to a student record should not cause a new budget to be run.
    
2. An SFS employee manually reset the Budget Required flag to "Yes – Budget Assign Required". This can be done individually through the Maintain Student FA Term page or in batch using Population Update in PeopleTools. One common reason for this adjustment is a change in budget amounts or assumptions after budgets have already been built. When SFS updates the programming logic, those changes are not automatically reflected in the budgets of students whose records have already been processed.

Which Terms?

On the budget selection run control you have the ability to enter in the aid year but it populates the term information. To adjust which careers & terms are being calculated during that aid year we will need to navigate to Menu > Set Up SACR > Product Related > Financial Aid > Budget > Budget Assignment Run Control. You will be prompted to enter in the aid year. Once the page refreshes you can use the +/- buttons to adjust the careers and terms that are being reviewed under that aid year.