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PublicationDate: 7/9/99 Summary: This message - Updates you on RFMS Testing and the Tip of the Week Author: PSS - Program Systems Service 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) This message - Updates you on Testing and the Tip of the Week TESTING CONTINUES We are continuing our testing of the Special Disbursement functions of RFMS. Testing has gone well. We are also presently testing the RFMS interface and functionality with the Student Account Manager component of the Access America Project. Access America for students is a government wide initiative to deliver electronic services from government agencies and organizations to postsecondary students. For the Fall 1999 semester, students at Access America for Students pilot schools will begin using the U.S. Department of Education's Student Account Manager (SAM) and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affair's Web Automated Verification of Enrollment (WAVE) on their campuses. To learn more about these projects, visit the website at http://www.students.gov. TIPS OF THE WEEK We are very pleased with RFMS’s processing of records. In an effort to help institutions avoid rejected records we have completed an analysis of RFMS’s processing of Originations to date, and identified the top 5 reasons that records have been rejected. Following these steps below will help to reduce the number of records that are returned thereby decreasing the amount of time both schools and RFMS spend processing records: 1) If a school submits an ineligible student, three error codes are returned. These error codes are 303, 311, and 312 for invalid SSN, invalid EFC and invalid transaction number. 2) If a school has different reporting campus and attending campus numbers, remember to include the reporting campus number on the Grant Batch Header and the Attending campus number in the Origination ID. 3) Check for valid values in your date fields. 4) The Grantee Duns Number is not a required field on the Grant Batch Header Record, however if it is sent, it must be in the following format: 999999999BB. This is a field length of 11, comprised of a unique 9 digit number and 2 blanks (the BB). The last two spaces must be blanks and will not be accepted if zero filled. If the Grantee Duns Number is incorrect or is in the incorrect format the batch will reject. 5) Batches sent under the wrong message class can not be processed. If an origination batch is identified as a disbursement batch in the Grant Batch header, the file can not be processed as either origination or disbursement and will be rejected. 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. |