Excel Training Specific to Financial Aid Functions
Excel saves time for tasks in the financial aid office and enhances your team’s proficiency. We can show you how.
By Sherri Savasta
A long time ago in an office far, far away (Chicago area, I currently reside in Mississippi), I was tasked with completing Pell reconciliations. This was for a seven-campus university system where millions of dollars were disbursed each award year. My method was comprised of printing out disbursement summaries from the Student Information System and comparing them manually to a printout of the year-to-date Pell summary. Picture yellow highlighters, followed by more colors, then check marks, dots, etc., as I kept reworking it to resolve variances. It was the only way I knew until a colleague introduced me to setting these up in Excel spreadsheets and using VLOOKUP pivot tables and other functions. I thought I knew a lot of Excel but not this much. This knowledge made the reconciliations a breeze!
Global knows there is rarely enough time in the day to do everything needed to the level of quality we’d like to achieve in today’s financial aid offices. Many financial aid offices suffer from chronic staffing shortages. (See our blog for details on staffing shortages and solutions.)
Since 1996, Global Financial Aid Services has provided consulting support in resolving compliance findings, providing ad hoc processing requests and technical reference support. Our team brings decades of experience to our solutions and familiarity with all aid delivery options for all size institutions. Global is thankful to all the experiences provided by our clients and capitalizes on this history to provide better service to clients moving forward.
I note the above because I am proud of the company where I've worked for the past 18 years. We’ve exceled not only with our depth of financial aid knowledge and processing expertise but also by using many tools to make processing as efficient as possible outside our software applications. One of these is the use of Excel.
Training is a major function within the Operations department, and one of the areas offered is Excel training. Global’s trainers can provide insight on how Excel can save time for tasks within the financial aid office. Training offerings include general Excel knowledge, ranging from entry level to advanced Excel users. In addition to general training, Global’s Ops team can provide tailored Excel trainings aimed at specific functions that accomplish work tasks, such as summarizing data from a report into a pivot table, then creating corresponding charts to visualize the data for a report or presentation. A common request includes how to use formulas such as V and XLOOKUPS, INDEX and MATCH, IF functions, and how to nest formulas for complex conditional results.
“Work smarter, not harder” is a quote credited to Allen F. Morgenstern, who created a work simplification program in the 1930s. If you have a need to enhance your team’s proficiency in Excel, please reach out and we can set up a meeting to discuss what options Global can provide, so your team works smarter.
Sherri Savasta is Global’s Director of Consulting. She has been with Global since 2006, bringing in-depth experience to financial aid processing solutions. Sherri can be reached at ssavasta@globafas.com and (228) 523-1072.