Awards

Awards encompasses three aspects of financial aid awards:

• Awards reports on financial aid for a given aid year. It considers awards in their entirety—that is, the total amount of an individual award given to a student as opposed to individual disbursements of that award.
• Disbursements provides details on individual disbursements scheduled for a particular timeframe. It considers awards in terms of when the disbursement actually posts to a student's account (whether it already has or it is scheduled to do so).
• Disbursement Batches gives you a workflow that creates and runs disbursements. The other two reports describe the details of the financial aid; here you'll find the tool that lets you apply it to your students' accounts.

Awards

Awards lists all aid awards connected to a given aid year.

When viewing the report, keep in mind that the U.S. Federal aid year runs from July 1 to June 30. We have hard-coded this into how Populi handles Financial Aid. So, for example, if a student applies for the 2025-2025 Aid Year, he's applying for Aid that he'd get between July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026. For Canadian schools, we can set up custom Aid Years if so desired.

• You can toggle between showing the report By Award or By Student.
• By Award shows all awards for every student. Students appear once for every award, regardless of status. If John Adams has an Institutional Scholarship in Setup, two accepted Stafford Loans, and has declined an Unsubsidized Loan, he'll appear on the report four times.
• By Student gives you totals for each student with any kind of award attached to their account.

Click Actions and select the action you'd like to perform for the students/awards shown on the report (actions are filter-sensitive).

• Email/Text Students: Three guesses what these do, and the first two don't count.
• Print Address Labels: Select an address label layout, and then choose whether to export a PDF or send an .ODT file to Communications > Print Queue.
• Export Aid Offers: Generates award letters for the students shown on the report. Choose an award letter layout and whether to export PDFs or send an .ODT to Communications > Print Queue.
• Cancel Awards: This cancels all the awards shown together with their scheduled disbursements. Awards that already have posted disbursements will not be affected.
• Offer Awards: This flips awards in Setup mode to Offered.
• Tag/Untag Students: Add or remove tags for the students represented on the report.
• Recalculate Percent Awards: If you're using percent-based awards, this action recalculates the amounts for awards not set to auto-calculate.
• Export XLS/CSV: Creates a spreadsheet or database showing all the awards in the report.

Disbursements

Disbursements shows all disbursements and refunds for a given timeframe. Use the filter to show different timeframes, awards, and more.

Disbursement batches

Disbursement batches lets you start new disbursement batches, resume in-progress batches, and view past batches.

• Read about running disbursement batches.
• Read about running refund batches.