The Financial Aid domain is responsible for maintaining inventories of awards and resources, maintaining general learner characteristics and needs, assigning awards to learners for disbursement by the Student Financials domain, administering the awarding of "outside" awards (e.g. departmental and 3rd party awards), and communicating information about awards and resources to other domains, third parties, learners, and other interested parties.
The Financial Aid design is based on the assumption that Financial Aid maintains a repository of financial data but is not responsible for "real money" transactions. The assumption is that Student Financials handles disbursements, deposits, and audits of learner accounts, even though a separate Institutional Financials or Foundation or Development Office (not parts of Kuali Student) may own and manage the pools of money from which aid is awarded.
The challenge with Financial Aid awarding and packaging is that some awards are distributed by polling all eligible learners and then assigning the awards. Other awards come with earmarks like third-party awards and scholarships and are guaranteed in most cases pending final eligibility determination. Finally, there is a need to accommodate the fact that some awards are awarded in a specific sequence. Packaging is assumed to be within certain time frames where different rules may apply (e.g., early packaging may be based on a percentage attrition), whereas later packages may be limited by the amount of money that is associated with the award. It is assumed that the model will be able to match learners with awards dynamically and that any change to the learner record could generate automatic repackaging. The domain also will support awards that are assigned to learners through subjective evaluation processes and work flow, rather than rules-driven eligibility.