OpenNet Enhancements Offer School-Customers Details About Loans in Process

The Oct. 24, 2005, enhancements to the OpenNet loan-delivery system will offer financial-aid administrators more-detailed information about education-loan status and disbursement changes. The enhancements expand on those implemented in spring 2005.

View change explanations
The “view change explanations” enhancement permits financial-aid staff to view change-explanation comments entered by users at their institutions when they perform loan-and-disbursement-level updates using OpenNet Web Loan Delivery.

The May 23, 2005, enhancements gave schools the ability to add explanations to change requests. The new change will allow schools to view the change explanations that they entered dating back to the spring enhancements.

To access the change-explanation comments, school users can navigate to the “Loan Activity” screen from the “Application/Loan Details” or the “Application/Loan Summary” screens.

School-tracking-lender-approval query
The new school-tracking-lender-approval query options will allow financial-aid administrators to view the status of pending transactions on loans to be disbursed by a lender or lender-servicer outside of the Sallie Mae disbursing system. As schools review the query results, they can work with the lender or lender-servicer to resolve the pending transactions.

To perform the query, users will choose “Query and Reporting” and click on the “Track Lender Approvals” option. A variety of sort and filter options are available to users performing the query.

The query-results page will display the following items:

• Borrower Social Security number.
• Borrower name.
• Date transaction received.
• Date an action applied to transaction.
• School ID.
• Lender ID.
• Agency working the transaction (lender, servicer or guarantor).
• CommonLine unique ID.
• Disbursement number.
• Transaction type.
• Action taken.
• Export link.

A results page will display 25 records per page. Schools can export the query results into a Microsoft Excel or Comma Separated Value file.

Financial-aid administrators who would like more information about these OpenNet enhancements can contact their USA Funds^® Services representative.