Disbursing scholarships and grant funds to students can be a real challenge, especially if you’re not an expert in finance and compliance. It can lead to errors and delays, which are not what you want when you’re trying to help students achieve their educational goals.
Challenges with disbursing scholarship funds
“Disbursement” refers to the financial aid payment process that typically happens around the time classes begin. Efficiently managed scholarship and grant disbursements can make a huge difference at the start of a student’s higher education journey and can often help bridge the financial gap until they receive their federal funding.
Scholarships and grants are disbursed differently from organization to organization but, in most cases, they are sent in the form of a check mailed directly to the student or credit to the student’s school account. Depending on the size of your award program, disbursement cycles can become overwhelming quickly. Handling multiple disbursement requests can become a hassle, writing and mailing checks can add up to a lot of administrative work, and it can often be difficult to keep track of funds once they are sent. Kaleidoscope’s tools can help make the process of allocating funds to students more seamless for sponsoring organizations.
Disbursement made simple
Our disbursement platform is designed to make awarding money to students quick and easy. You don’t have to worry anymore about the administrative burden on your team because our platform and team will give you the tools and expertise needed to create a hassle-free disbursement process.
The Kaleidoscope platform’s client portal allows sponsors to manage each stage of their program, including disbursements. In the portal, administrators can create disbursement request forms customized to the needs of their program. These forms can be configured to confirm a student’s disbursement information and gather any additional information needed to process a student’s request.
One of the most common reasons funds are delayed is due to missing documentation. The Kaleidoscope client portal allows program administrators to send notifications of deadlines directly to scholarship recipients and provides students with a place to submit required documentation. Students and administrators can access and update this documentation at any time all in one place.
Once all required documentation is submitted, students can request disbursements directly through their student portal and program administrators will receive notification that a new request has been made. Program Administrators can customize their settings to receive notifications whenever a disbursement request is submitted or processed. This helps administrators stay on top of disbursements and efficiently process requests, so students are not waiting on their funding. This makes requesting disbursements equally efficient for students, who can log in to their student portal, see the amount of funds available to them, and directly submit a disbursement request that is pre-filled with information from their existing profile.
Kaleidoscope can also help process payments to educational institutions on your behalf, freeing your team of the administrative burden of writing and mailing checks. Whether you are processing checks yourself or through Kaleidoscope, your client reporting dashboard can make monitoring the status of your checks easy by showing you the dates on which checks are sent and cleared, saving you the headache of wondering if your payments have been processed yet.
Looking for help with your disbursement process?
Kaleidoscope streamlines the entire scholarship and grant lifecycle, from application to review all the way through to final disbursement. By managing disbursements in the same portal as the rest of your program, you can remove unnecessary friction and create transparency, while freeing up time for your team. To learn more about how our all-in-one platform can make managing your programs simple, send us a message.
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