Financial Aid System

New student financial aid system is live

PowerFAIDS, the university’s new financial aid system, is now live. In addition to replacing an aging technology system, PowerFAIDS will help WashU’s Student Financial Services (SFS) enhance how we serve and recruit students.

“PowerFAIDS will enhance WashU’s ability to support opportunities for deserving students to gain a world class education,” noted Beverly Wendland, provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

PowerFAIDS has automated many manual processes for the SFS office and will better integrate with other university systems, including Slate and eventually Workday. Changes like these create more time for the SFS team to directly serve our students.

For instance, before PowerFAIDS, SFS ran a monthly manual process to update more than 100 student social security numbers in SIS. These updates were needed to either correct student input errors or reverse the university’s temporary dummy data for international students without SSNs. With PowerFAIDS, these records are automatically updated in SIS each night. PowerFAIDS’s built-in workflows also have eliminated many external reports that SFS used to drive processes and manage hand-offs.

“We in Student Financial Services are excited about going live with PowerFAIDS. PowerFAIDS is a best-in-breed financial aid software that will allow us to serve students in more personal, efficient and simple ways than was possible with our outdated home-grown system,” said Michael Runiewicz, assistant vice provost and director of student financial services. “PowerFAIDS’s robust, straightforward reporting capabilities will allow us to make timelier, data-informed decisions and make reporting much more accessible to the SFS team. We are particularly excited about the integrations with Slate, our undergraduate admissions system, that allow us to create a seamless, simple experience for prospective and newly admitted first year students.”

Who will use PowerFAIDS?

All Danforth academic and administrative units will be required to use PowerFAIDS to send award letters and track financial aid status for university reporting purposes. Departments that use supplemental admissions systems may continue to use these. However, Slate is the only admissions system that will integrate with PowerFAIDS.

Academic Year 2020-21

New undergraduate day students already receiving aid will continue to use the Slate Financial Aid Portal for the 2020-21 school year, while returning students will continue to use My FA Access (STAR).

Academic Year 2021-22

As of Oct. 15, SFS will use PowerFAIDS to process applicants for the 2021-22 academic year. Additionally, both applicants and current students applying for financial aid for the 2021-22 year will use Net Partner, the web version of PowerFAIDS, for financial aid-related activities.

What’s next?

The system launch and initial processing of students in PowerFAIDS marked the conclusion of Phase 1 of the PowerFAIDS project. We will migrate current students to PowerFAIDS during Phase 2, which will conclude in March 2021.