[Doug Creek]

Since our funds mirror our FE projects (where the scholarships are paid from) we have the ability to link it to the actual fund... The problem is the up keep and entry of all the scholarship every semester, hence why import is becoming more and more of a necessity for us...

We have decided against putting students in our database (for the reason Bonnie mentions) and also, if the person didn't graduate from your school, are they really going to have the inclination to give back, even tho they recieved the scholarship? That's the next issue is finding a way to pull (side by side in our grad pulls from banner) who recieved what scholarship...

For those of you that don't have your funds setup to mirror some accounting structure, I would suggest an Org record of the scholarship that you can then link to the individuals who recieved the scholarship (and if you want, create a dummy fund that can be excluded and link that to the org so you know which scholarship, kind of redundant, but...).

I did this for our fund/endowment reports so when a person changes, I wouldn't have to update up to 50 links to funds. I update the org record to the new individual and done... It works like a relational table for a database (for those that know the theory behind that). Basically its: fund record "Many to One" organization record "one to many (and this works, I've done it for a position with more then one person in it)" individual record(s). I code the organizational with everything I can think of to keep it from pulling on any mailing list, then built a custom report that shows the fund/endowment balance information from FE (while displaying fund information from RE (took me a while, but its pretty cool)).

I could potentially do the same thing for scholarship recipients, but it would be overly redundant because a person doesn't "change" scholarships after a while, they either get it or they don't. But, this WOULD be a way around the import problem...

Doug