Background for Multiple Disbursements

You can use the Multiple Disbursements feature to schedule more than one disbursement per payment period (or term) in an automated fashion. The Multiple Disbursements feature automates the determination of disbursement dates, as opposed to using Disbursement Schedules (which is disabled when a client enables Multiple Disbursements), and still limits the process to a single disbursement per payment period or term. This significantly reduces the amount of annual maintenance of some configurations under Financial Aid and allows institutions to define the structure for their disbursement dates via a set of rules so that they automatically populate the dates desired. The exception is for the regulatory requirement when awarding a Direct Loan and using the configuration to specify a minimum number of disbursements per loan.

Since the Multiple Disbursements feature relies on the use of Term Association for term based programs, you must ensure that Term Association is configured and maintained. The Multiple Disbursements feature does not support program versions offered via non-standard terms. A campus that offers programs via non-standard terms should not activate Multiple Disbursements. Options to support non-standard terms are under consideration for a future release.

Multiple Disbursement System Settings

Multiple Disbursements can be configured to automatically exclude weekends and/or holidays when determining disbursement dates, or use the state on the student's ISIR to determine the date of a disbursement (state laws may require disbursements to occur on specific dates or under specific conditions). While Financial Aid Automation (FAA) allows for the configuration of exclusions, this feature is not available outside of FAA without purchasing the Anthology Student license.

Having an active license is essential. If you do not have a license, you will be able to see some aspects of some features (via the user interface and Help), and you may learn what options you will gain with Anthology Student, but the screens will show clear reminders that feature activation requires the license.

Auto Recalculate Multiple Disbursements

With Multiple Disbursements, you can structure disbursement dates via a set of rules which then automatically populate the dates desired. Recalculate Multiple Disbursements can be configured to automatically reevaluate scheduled and canceled disbursement dates under specific conditions. Though Anthology Student has always allowed for the manual evaluation of disbursement dates, there has never been an option to facilitate an automatic reevaluation of more than one disbursement. This feature can be used, for example, if the Student Pace Evaluator were to be run for a student, and the Payment Period dates shift, there might be some cases where a disbursement date would also need to shift.