Tracking Offered Dates

Joel Spiess

Our university is comprised of numerous awarding units (schools/colleges) and is interested in tracking the Offered dates on opportunities, as we establish a best-practice timeline for awarding units to follow. Ideally, we would track those offers that are made outside of our timeline and ask the awarding unit for rationale. We know we can see the dates in the apply-to/auto-match grid view when applicants are first categorized as Offered; however, once an applicant accepts the opportunity, the categorized date is overridden by Acceptance, and we lose a universal place to view/export Offered dates. I spoke with BAM support, and they have no workaround for this other than manually reviewing each student's history to see when the award was offered. This is too tedious for us. Might anyone else have a practice for collecting Offered dates, or ideas we might pursue? We'd like to pull this data annually.

Victor Swindell

@Joel Spiess It's been awhile since I played with the API but I do remember it not being to flexible..and dates on an award could also change when you edit it.

Lindley Davis

@Joel Spiess

We've created an offer category that we've named Pre-Offer. It encumbers funds but isn't visible to the student. Typically we use it when we know funds are coming from a donor but they haven't arrived yet. It's a holding category of sorts. You could create something similar and remove the “Offered” category from the Opportunity Admin role after your best practice date. They could use Pre-Offer to indicate awards and your office could review all awards in that category on a set schedule and work with units to move them into Offered.

Klysicia Young

@Joel Spiess
Our timeline is set to select students a year ahead with deadlines to process funds disbursements before fee bills are released (July). We are exploring renaming our seasons on the backend sourced to the end date month to track the current year and other off-cycle awards (study-abroad, internship, etc.)

Example: Our timeline runs from Nov 1 - Sept 1, with defined deadlines based on classification (incoming freshmen, UG, and grad).

Right now, all months are labeled as the end date month to “Academic Year” of the following year. The tricky part for us was knowing when our financial need calculations would advance (if you have those projections on your import file). Our data advances in February to reflect the next academic year.

Likely, we will change the month of January to reflect the “Academic Year” for the current year to capture any final current school year data. Also, change June to be labeled as “Summer” of the current year to capture the internship/study abroad awards that are not need-base.

We'll use the updated season to track what “Season” the funds are awarded and disbursed.

Hope that helps