Understanding IRP Student – Learner Financial Management 

The Integrated Renewal Program – Student (IRP Student) has numerous focus areas – following the student journey from application to graduation.  This series aims to explain each area, its unique requirements, and our designed solutions in terms you, our UBC community, will understand.    

Workday Student will replace UBC’s Student Information System (SIS). It will be the foundation for the renewed student information ecosystem, integrating with external systems - both existing and new - that are required to conduct operations at UBC.   

Learner Financial Management (LFM) is the ability to administer and regulate charges and payments on student financial accounts.  

The heart of Learner Financial Management is assessing student charges and processing student payments. We want to ensure students are assessed the correct amounts for their programs/courses and they can clearly see what needs to be paid and when.

 - Michael Eastwood, Business Lead – Learner Financial Management  

There are numerous aspects of LFM to consider: 

Fee Rules Set Up 

Fee Rules Set Up is the ability to manage the rules used to calculate tuition and fees. Currently, a combination of Maintenance Service Centre (MSC) tables and Quick Rules, a third-party software that is no longer supported, are used.  

In the upgraded system, charges can be tied to an academic unit structure or a program of study, and calculations can be performed to refine eligibility on the tuition and student fee amount. These calculations are built into Workday Student’s Calculation Engine, the same tool used for payroll and benefit calculations.  

Sponsorship Management  

Sponsorship Management involves the administration of third-party sponsors’ (e.g., Indigenous communities, employers, or government agencies) agreements to pay a student's tuition and fees. Currently, sponsorship contract details are entered in the SIS and a student can have only one sponsor. In the Student Service Centre (SSC), students can see which charges their sponsor is paying and which they are responsible for.  

Workday Student, however, will allow a student to have multiple sponsors, and a sponsorship contract can have multiple students, provided the same terms apply to all students. Sponsor payments will be treated as anticipated once the contract has been created, meaning students can start to see how it will affect their balance. 

Learner Account Management  

This area ensures transactions on a student’s account are correct. Currently, the SIS recalculates tuition and fees for all past sessions/terms when a student’s account is flagged for recalculation.  

A student’s account is recalculated by the current overnight process, or when staff manually recalculate it. The SIS simply overwrites previous charges and students are left confused trying to understand their financial account. 

Workday Student will follow an assessment schedule controlling which students and academic periods are assessed nightly. A student’s account is recalculated by the overnight process or when staff manually recalculate it (real-time assessment is coming soon).  

Workday never overwrites an existing transaction, but rather creates new transactions to apply adjustments and clearly show when a charge has been adjusted or prorated. 

Learner Payment 

Learner Payment is the ability to accept and apply payments to a student's account. Payments are currently received from many different sources and a sum of the charges and payments creates a student’s balance. It is sometimes unclear which charges have been paid and what is still outstanding. 

In Workday Student, however, payments are applied to charges according to payment precedence rules, which allows the system to clearly show which charges have been paid and which remain outstanding. 

U-Pass Management  

U-Pass (Universal Pass) BC provides students with affordable access to transit. U-Pass Management involves administering these regional transit passes, including applications for exemptions, and tracking monthly statuses.  

U-Pass Vancouver and Okanagan are currently assessed per term for winter session and per month in summer for Vancouver. When assessed, the U-Pass charge is locked, meaning it will not adjust automatically. For U-Pass Vancouver, manual adjustments are quite common. 

With the upgraded system, U-Pass Vancouver can be assessed monthly all year.  

Delinquent Financial Account Management  

Delinquent Account Management is past-due account management. It includes all activities associated with recovering past-due fees or writing them off if they aren't recoverable.  This includes: 

• Monitoring past-due accounts. 
• Applying holds to prevent students from receiving services when their accounts are past due. 
• Reaching out to students to encourage them to pay. 
• Applying interest and hold fees to past-due accounts. 
• Sending students to a collection agency. 
• Writing off their past-due account balances if they can't be recovered. 

Currently, the tracking of collection activities is manual and kept in a spreadsheet. With Workday, there is an automatic hold process. Reports will be built for past due balances that extend beyond the end of a session.  We'll be able to leverage the collection record on the student account to track all collection activities (including internal activities to reach out to the student before we send them to a collection agency). 

Tax Slip Generation 

This is the process by which tax slips are generated and made available for students. Forms are currently generated in the SIS for T2202s and T4As and are made available to students through the Student Service Centre (SSC). In the future, tax slips will be generated in Workday Student for students and can be accessed and printed directly.  

Fee Reconciliation and Remittance  

Fee Reconciliation and Remittance manages fee collections and payments to internal and external organizations. Currently, revenue is sent to the Finance system at a summary level on a monthly basis. Reports are used to reconcile revenue and fees charged on behalf of the student societies. 

With the new integrated system, all transactions created in Workday Student will automatically create transactions in Finance. These will be individual transactions with student work tags on each transaction, making all amounts traceable to individual students.

For more information about IRP Student focus areas, we invite you to read the other entries in this content series on the IRP Student website.  

*Reflecting on our experience so far in working with Workday and seeing how our design is shaping up, we realize that we have to embrace change and be confident in our ability to adapt. Workday Student, along with IRP Student’s functional requirements, are evolving quickly and this could mean that we may have to adapt our approach throughout the project timeline.