Automated Refund Calculation Settings

The advanced processing features of Financial Aid Automation enable institutions to automate Return to Title IV (R2T4) and Institutional Refund (IR) calculations along with Post-Withdrawal Disbursement management and monitoring features. The Workflow component may be used to update data and/or complete the processes that are necessary for calculations to have current data at the time of execution.

When the 'Status Represents a Title IV WithdrawalClosed At some institutions, students that are no longer attending classes are left in an Active/Attending status so that they can still log into the Student Portal. In this scenario, the “Status Represents a Title IV Withdrawal” check box can be selected to indicate that the status represents a withdrawal for Title IV purposes. If this attribute is selected, the Status Change process will treat a status change from an Active status to the new Active status with the Title IV withdrawal attribute as if the status change was from Active to Drop for purposes of determining the NSLDS Withdrawal Date, Date of Determination, and other downstream impacts to Financial Aid, Student Accounts, and other reporting (such as enrollment reporting and Clearinghouse). This check box is displayed only when Attending is selected for System Status and Withdrawn is selected for NSLDS Status. field is enabled for a current Active status category (Add or Edit Student Statuses), Automated Refund Calculation will create a refund calculation through the automated refund calculation job.

Key areas include:

  • Configuring and creating R2T4 and Institutional Refund worksheets.

  • Managing and monitoring Post-Withdrawal Disbursements owed to the student/parent.

Note: When Automated Refund Calculation is run, the system will remove a student from a student group when that student's Return to Title IV funds (R2T4) or Institutional Refund (IR) records were updated to Approved or No Longer Needed. This functionality applies to students with Active and Drop statuses.

Configuring Automated Refund Calculation

An institution needs to complete a series of configuration steps before executing a job for Automated Refund Calculation. The prerequisites in Anthology Student include configuring institutional refund policies used by an institution. (See Automated Institutional Refund Policy)

In addition, there are Contact Manager activities (emails, web alerts, other tasks) and documents that need to be created for automatically communicating with the student and parents regarding Post-Withdrawal Disbursements, Inadvertent Overpayments, Return to COD Funds, and the Student Cash Payment Plan.

  • Navigate to Configuration > Contact Manager > Documents to configure the additional documents and activities to communicate with the student and/or parent.

  • Navigate to Configuration > Student Accounts > Refund Policies to configure the policies used by your institution to automate.

Note: Within the Assignment tab, you can utilize collapsible accordions for the Apply Filter functionality and the data grid so one or both can be opened and collapsed. There is also an Expand All option on the data grid that will collapse the Apply Filter accordion and the data grid will cover the full page of the form. This functionality enables you to minimize the Refund Calculation Assignment field section and expand the data results grid to better view every displayed assignment (across multiple pages) for all refund calculation types.

The following functionality is available across seven tabs within the form:

Institutional Policy

You can use the Automated Institutional Refund Policy form to define a refund policy that may be applied to a student. As there may be a number of institutional refund policies that may apply to a student, the Department of Education requires that the refund policy that benefits the student the most must be utilized when calculating the refund.

See the Automated Institutional Refund Policy form topic.

Approval Percentage

Within the Automated Refund Approval Percentage and Freeze Date form, you can configure Anthology Student to present a percentage of the Return to Title IV (R2T4) and Institutional Refund (IR) transactions for manual review and approval before posting the results of the Title IV worksheet. This same configuration can also be used to have Anthology Student automatically approve the R2T4 and IR calculations.

Academy icon   Review the training (Anthology Academy registration and login required):

Configuring Automated Refund Approval Percentage  (2 min.)

You can also configure a Freeze Date for existing records by selecting a specific record(s) from the grid and clicking Freeze Date in the toolbar. A pop-up form is displayed where you can define the Freeze date criteria.

See the Automated Refund Approval Percentage and Freeze Date form topic.

Age Days

To manage timeliness and set visual cues for personnel regarding reviewing refund calculations and post-withdrawal disbursements, the Automated Refund Calculation Age Days form can be used to configure age days to manage processing times.

Academy icon   Review the training (Anthology Academy registration and login required):

Configuring Automated Refund Calculation Age Days  (3 min.)

See the Automated Refund Calculation Age Days form topic.

Assignment

Using the Automated Refund Calculation Assignment form, you can assign the Return to Title IV, Institutional Refund, and Cash Payment Plan to a staff member, staff group, or advisor. The Automated Refund Calculation will provide completed worksheets which will be reviewed.

Academy icon   Review the training (Anthology Academy registration and login required):

Configuring Automated Refund Calculation Assignments  (5 min.)
 

See the Automated Refund Calculation Assignment form topic.

Notification

The Automated Refund Calculation Notifications form is used to send notification of Post Withdrawal Disbursement, Inadvertent Overpayment PWD, or Refund activities to a student and/or parent using Contact Manager Email, Web Alert, and Letter.

The email and web alert activities are executed using a Windows service that runs every 2 minutes. If the time frequency needs to be configured for a different interval of time, your Information Technology department can make an adjustment to the schedule. It can be set to run as frequently as you desire depending on your organization's operational model.

See the Automated Refund Calculation Notifications form topic.

PWD Assignment

Upon approval of a Return to Title IV worksheet, there may be a Post Withdrawal Disbursement that is created that needs to be managed and tracked for permissions from a student and/or parent. The assignment can be done by campus and program name to one or more staff members, staff groups or advisors within the Automated Post Withdrawal Disbursementform.

See the Automated Post Withdrawal Disbursement Assignment form topic.

PWD Tracking Status

A configuration setting made within the Automated Post Withdrawal Document Tracking Statusis the document status that is used to apply to a student and parent document status as it is being managed through the Contact Manager document tracking form. These statuses are used across all campuses in the database for the Automated Refund Calculation feature. An institution needs to create document status prior to completing Post Withdrawal Disbursement Tracking Status Configuration.

See the Automated Post Withdrawal Document Tracking Status form topic.

Additional Automated Refund Calculation Functionality

Cash Payment Plan

An institution can create a cash payment plan that can be associated with the balance owed after a student has withdrawn and all refund calculations have been applied.

See Automated Cash Payment Plan.

Exception Routing

The Automated Refund Calculation feature creates exceptions that need to be routed to a staff member, staff group, or advisor to review and remediate within the Financial Aid Automation Exception Management framework. The process of routing exceptions is the same for each of the processes available in the Financial Aid Automation Foundation features.

See Manage Automated Exception Routing.

Exception Properties

Within Automated Refund Calculation there are a few exceptions that can have values updated within the properties to fit your institution's naming conventions. There are limits on what can be updated and adjusted.

See Automated Exception Management .