Using ‘Student Finance Update’ Screen

The Student Finance Update (SFU) screen displays information on a student that has been imported from the Student Loans Company, together with information from Finance.

The record imported from the sponsor via the ISFU screen is held in the SFU table. Records with a particular issue date do NOT over-write any previous records i.e. a new SFU record is created each time an updated record is received from the sponsor. Thus a SFU record will exist for each student and issue date. The issue date is contained in the header record of the import file. The “Last Rec?” field on the SFU record indicates if the record you are looking at is the latest one received from the sponsor. This is determined by the issue date.

Files received from a sponsor should be processed in the order they are received. If you do not, earlier records for a student will NOT be used to create SFU records.

When a record is imported from the file, a record is added to the SFU table if it does not already exist for the student and issue date. The data imported from the sponsor appears in the top third part of the screen. Then there is an attempt to match the data in the file against data held in the database using the following:

  • Student record
  • Course application
  • Course join
  • Course enrolment

Where a match is found the screen will also display information about the fee transactions that have been processed for the student. Information about the matching is displayed in the bottom two thirds of the screen.

Where a student record is matched i.e. a student code is available, the program will look for fee transactions for the student in the relevant academic year. All transactions for that student will be scanned and summarised. This may produce a slightly odd result but SITS think it is probably more helpful to show evidence of FTR records than to limit it to just the ones associated with a matched SCJ code. The fees analysis button on the screen can be selected to see the current position for a student.

The finance view summarises invoiced and not invoiced transactions for the student. Sub-totals are shown where the debtor is the sponsor e.g. SLC, or the student or some other debtor. It should be noted that these are not the “live” figures; they are the figures produced by the last matching process. The latest figures can be obtained by performing a fees analysis or by re-matching the student.

It is strongly advised to complete the matching process before any further import files are processed from the sponsor since that will ensure any updates from the sponsor are processed correctly.

Remember also if you are amending records manually, you should ensure the changes are being applied to the latest record received from the sponsor.

A number of other points should be noted from the SFU screen, the “Last Rec?” field indicates whether this SFU is the last record received from the sponsor (Y) or whether it has been superseded by a later record (N). Retrieving all the records for a particular academic year where “Last Rec?” = “Y” will produce a list of the latest records received from the sponsor.

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