Enhancements to the Letter of Appointment File

Victor Yellen, Assistant Provost

The Letter of Appointment File has been updated to allow for the payment of full tuition fees for graduate assistants and pre-doctoral fellowships, when appropriate. The payment of the full fees will include matriculation, out-of-state fees, non-Florida financial aid, material and supply fees and other non-matriculation fees.

Beginning with Fall semester, this process will be used to fund the full fees for the alumni fellowships and the new minority fellowships (those awarded to begin 1999-2000). The departments will input the Letter of Appointment records for these students and will fund the matriculation and out-of- state portion of the waivers. Based on lists of the fellowship recipients which the colleges have sent to Sheri Austin, Provost’s Office, she will set flags in the Letter of Appointment File which will indicate their eligibility for full funding. She will then list the account(s) to be used to pay the difference between matriculation and full fees.

Departments may also make use of this process to pay full fees for a student if the funding source(s) permit payment of the additional fees. To do this a department should contact Nancy Paris in the Academic Personnel Office (PO Box 113005, FAX 846-0244 or email at nparis@ufl.edu) to ask her to input the information into the Letter of Appointment File. The correspondence should include the name of the student, social security number, semester(s) to be funded and the account(s) to be charged for the additional fees. This will replace the need to process a Payment Authorization form to pay the additional fees. General revenue accounts and tuition waiver authority may not be used to pay for the additional fees. If tuition remission accounts are used initially, they must be replaced with budgeted accounts by the end of the semester.

The Letter of Appointment File will be updated shortly to allow flags for each semester that will denote if a student is to receive full funding for his/her fees. These flags will appear beside the heading of “Full Fees” on the first screen of the Letter of Appointment File. They will be marked after a student has been approved for additional funding by the Provost’s Office or after a department has submitted a request for additional funding to Nancy Paris. If the funding is to be provided, an “X” will appear in the field next to the semester. Currently these fields can only be updated by Academic Affairs.

The second screen of the Letter of Appointment File is also being updated. The funding information for Spring semester has been moved to the right of Fall semester and the Summer semester funding will appear at the bottom of the screen. This will allow room for the listing of the accounts to be used for funding the additional fees. If a student is to receive a waiver of full fees, the account information will appear directly below the funding for the matriculation and out-of-state fees. One or two accounts may be used to fund the additional fees. The percentage of fees to be charged to each account must be listed and must total 100%. The funding of the additional fees will only display after the accounts to be charged have been entered into the file by Academic Affairs. Otherwise, these fields will not display.

If a department is funding the additional fees, the charges will appear on the departmental accounting records with a different object code. The matriculation and out-of-state fees will appear under 740055. The balance of the full fees will be assigned to 740008.

All funding for waivers must be input by the appropriate fee deadlines to avoid late fee charges.

Please contact Nancy Paris at 392-1251 should you have questions on these new processes.