No Cycle management

Grace Doyle

Hi all, I am wondering if any other large scale Universities opt out of Cycle Management? We are struggling to find the right time for CM but we not sure if it was really needed. A KB article says it helps streamline opportunities but I not not sure that is a big enough benefit for the cost of finding a time to shut down for CM.

Stephanie Lamphere

@Grace Doyle I'm not sure how you could do subsequent award years without going through Cycle Management. That's how you differentiate your award cycles for each fiscal year, and set the disbursement amounts and number of awards for each opportunity. Otherwise it'll all be one big cycle that you have to constantly increase the amount available and number of awards every year. CM allows each fiscal year to stand on its own, which our auditors and our financial aid office really need. And personally I like having previous fiscal years archived, so there's less “noise” that I have to filter out when I'm running reports and downloading student post-acceptance materials.

We do CM in mid-March after all the spring awards are made. It's down for about a week while we make updates to the cloned opportunities (mass updating is helpful here, and there's a lot you can do ahead of time), and we launch applications in April for the upcoming year. It's just a really necessary part of the process, otherwise you lose all your historical tracking data for each FY, and you would still have to make all the opportunity updates anyway with the new deadlines, disbursements, number of awards, etc.

Grace Doyle

@Stephanie Lamphere
Thank you so much for your perspective!

Shawndi Wilson

@Grace Doyle
We do cycle management in the sense that we clone opportunities; however, we do not archive our applications since we have two application options open at one time. We are asking which academic year on our scholarship application so we probably are not the norm.

Denise Burford

@Grace Doyle We're with Stephaie. We feel CM is vital. We complete cycle mang mid-Nov for start of new appl 1/1. Things we do ahead of CM, in BAM: add new scholarship opps, add new conditional appls so they are cloned for next cycle, ask scholarship directors to review GEN appl for new questions or rework of others they have asked to be on the gen appl to reach students outside their college. Some things that are not relevant to the opp pools or decisions, like Post-acceptance can also be tweaked prior to CM. Or PA and Comms can be edited outside of BAM ready to copy in after CM.

Rhonda Seyfried

@Grace Doyle We also do cycle management the second Friday in June after the spring cycle has closed. We have a very large system and in addition to all of the issues stated by our colleagues, the system will start running very slowly without the annual CM.

Lindley Davis

@Grace Doyle

We do Cycle Management in October and we use it only to archive applications and clone opportunities. We don't archive opportunities until the end of the fiscal year. Operating this way means that we have opportunities for two aid years open simultaneously, but it's worked well for us as long as we stay organized. This way we can make any changes to awards for our current academic year and continue to award available funding while running an application cycle and matching students for the upcoming year.

Mallorie Fonseca

@Grace Doyle

We have cycle management once a year on November 1 but have two cycles going for the upcoming and current year. One reason we do this (outside of the other reasons mentioned in this thread already) is for user management. Without archiving the General Application, we would never remove the inactive users from our auto-matching scholarships. We have users created on import so it's really important for us to remove those ineligible students at least once a year. I'd probably do it twice a year if we could get every department on the same application period cycle!