Fund Disbursement - API

Klysicia Young

Is anyone using the API for fund disbursements where the funds automatically kick off from the system? We've met with some schools that download disbursement reports and upload the report to their student record system to kick off those funds. We are looking for anyone who has an automated process

Lindsey Campbell

@Klysicia Young Have you found anyone? We are interested in doing the same here and would love to find some resources to make it happen. We are an Ellucian Banner school - so anyone that has figured it out for Ellucian Banner would be awesome. What have you found?

Chelsea Sherbut

@Lindsey Campbell Banner school here too, still doing manual, weekly Excel cheq reqs. Very interested in hearing from someone who's solved this.

Marykay Klara

@Klysicia Young We also are a Banner school interested in learning about crediting from BAM to Banner and how you get reports to check for overawards before students can see the scholarship in Banner. Thank you.

Michael Elliott

@Klysicia Young I am interested in learning more about the API as well. We are a PeopleSoft School.

Lindley Davis

@Klysicia Young

We have an automated process. We get a disbursement API from BAM pushed to Banner nightly. It captures any changes to award categories, load codes, or disbursement distributions. We've also built a job into Banner that allows us to push it manually if needed. I'm not techy enough to understand how the process was built, but feel free to PM me any questions and I can reach out to our IT team.

Klysicia Young

@Lindley Davis Yes! Any information you can share would be greatly appreciated!

Stevi Parmentier

@Michael Elliott, we are a Peoplesoft school and we have automated the process. We use a bash unix script (scheduled using cron) to get the last time we retrieved the information from BAM. It then calls BAM (using curl) to get encumbered funds awarded since the last time we retrieved the information from BAM. Once the file is downloaded, the script writes that to a shared drive that PeopleSoft has access to. It also writes a copy of the file to an archive folder so that we have a record of the files. We then have a scheduled a job in Peoplesoft that loads the file via file parser.

Hopefully that kind of techy answer helps!

Klysicia Young

@Stevi Parmentier Hey Stevi, on your script, does it call from the Encumbered Funds grid or the Fund Disbursement grid?

Stevi Parmentier

@Klysicia Young, it is the Fund disbursements grid. I can see how the way I worded that was a little confusing.

Demicia Colbert

@Klysicia Young We personally don’t use an API for disbursement. Honestly, getting the different departments to agree on any updates to improve the process would take a miracle. That said, I did some benchmarking with Florida State University, and they do use an API process to disburse funds. If you’d like, I can reach out to my contact there and see if they’d be willing to join the conversation and share their insight. Just let me know!