| PublicationDate: 6/4/99 Summary: Update on the Recipient and Financial Management System (RFMS) Author: PSS - Program Systems Service June 4, 1999 To: All Destination Points From: Jerry Russomano, Director Program Systems Service, Office of Student Financial Assistance Subject: Update on the Recipient and Financial Management System (RFMS) RFMS BEGINS PROCESSING ORIGINATION RECORDS As most of you already know, on May 26 we began sending your 1999-2000 Electronic Statement of Account (ESOA) to your TIVWAN mailbox, and began accepting origination records. The submission and processing of your batches has gone very well. Let us recognize and offer our congratulations to the first institution to submit origination records to the new Recipient and Financial Management System! That school was the Heald College-School of Business of Santa Rosa, CA. Congratulations! As of June 4, we have received a total of 62 batches from 40 schools. We are proud to announce that the processing of batches is proceeding smoothly. We will continue to monitor the processing of records by the system, and pay close attention to any feedback you may have in an effort to make sure the Pell Grant processing flows smoothly. ON THE HORIZON Testing of RFMS continues. We have begun the testing of RFMS processing of regular disbursements. You can expect RFMS to begin processing regular disbursement on June 25, 1999. FYI In an effort to help you, as you begin to regularly process records and receive acknowledgements, we have posted a consolidated list of the RFMS error codes in a .pdf format for easy reference. This printable file can be downloaded from http://www.ifap.ed.gov. Look in the Bookshelf under the Pell Grant Process. DONT FORGET Last month the Office of Student Financial Assistance Programs launched a new e-mail listserv called SFATECH. SFATECH is an on-line e-mail listserv for your technical questions about SFA systems and software. I invite Heald, as well as the other 39 schools to come on-line and share your experience with the community. Of particular value would be your lessons learned about how to avoid common errors. WE WILL CONTINUE TO SEND YOU WEEKLY STATUS REPORTS Look for them in- - Title IV Wide Area Network (TIVWAN) - The Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP) website located at http://www.ifap.ed.gov, and - Listserves: - FINAID-L - FINNET-L - MEDAID-L - BURSAR-L - SFATECH IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS - If you have questions, comments, or concerns about RFMS, please call Pell Customer Service at 1-800/474-7268 (select option 2) or send an e-mail to #Pell_Systems@ed.gov. - If you have questions about the 1999-2000 EDExpress Pell software, contact the Central Processing System Customer Service Staff at 1-800/330-5947 or send an e-mail to CPS@NCS.COM. - If you have questions about RFMS message classes or problems connecting to the network, contact the TIVWAN Customer Service Staff at 1-800/615-1189 or send an e-mail to T4WAN@NCS.COM. Reminder: Your TIVWAN EDConnect Desk Reference contains all the information you need about getting help by telephone or on the Internet. |