Accounting

Scholarships, Stipends, and Performance Agreements

The types of payments Financial Aid will process are limited to scholarships, stipends, and performance agreements for currently enrolled undergraduate UC Riverside students. 

Graduate student payment requests should be routed to Graduate Division (contact: Omar Faustino-Carreon) or School of Medicine student payments should be routed to School of Medicine (contact: Theresa Luther). 

Financial Aid uses WorkFront as the online project management tool to process scholarship, stipend, and performance agreement requests. You can access WorkFront through R’Space under the Trainings and Tools section.

Definitions

Scholarships are financial support for students to pay for educationally related expenses. They are earned by meeting criteria of the scholarship donor/organization. Some are merit based and some are financial need based; some are a combination of the both. Some scholarships can be renewable with certain criteria needing to be met (such as units required, GPA, financial need). Scholarships can be from on campus departments or outside agencies. 

Stipends are financial assistance or support paid to university students. There should be no obligation to perform any assigned tasks or specific projects and no work should be assigned, according to this chart from Accounting.

Performance agreements are payments for services rendered through an executed agreement, request to be submitted after service is provided.

Timelines

During non-peak seasons, it will take Financial Aid 2-3 weeks to process requests. During the peak season of July-October, it will take 4-5 weeks to process.

Priority deadlines will be established soon. The goal of the priority deadlines are to ensure that the scholarship or stipend is processed in time for the fee payment deadlines. Financial Aid will continue to process all scholarships submitted after these dates; these deadlines are the last dates in which we can guarantee processing will be completed prior to the fee payment deadlines.

WorkFront Request Information 

Review this user guide to learn how to submit the proper WorkFront request ticket.

Forms

In the event you're having trouble downloading the form through Workfront, you can access the forms here.

• Scholarship Form
• Stipend Form
• Performance Agreement - embedded within the WorkFront ticket

Funding Information

Be ready to transfer funds. If the scholarship/stipend is an award your department/unit manages, the funding will need to be transferred to Financial Aid. Financial Aid cannot start processing until funds are transferred. If funding is not transferred, there will be a delay in processing your request. Financial Aid will only keep requests with pending funds opened for 4 weeks. Financial Aid will reach out to the department/unit regularly during that time.

The COA for Financial Aid awards will have a standard set of values listed below. Currently, the primary values that will vary will be the Fund, Activity, and Project. 

Entity	Fund	Activity	Account	Function	Program	Project	Flex 1	Flex 2
1511	Your Fund	A01465 or A01601	BC35	78	000	KXXXXXXXXX or 0000000000	0000000000	00000000

If a Project Number does not apply, then 0000000000 will be the Project value. For accounts with a Project Number (beginning with K), they must have a budget under BC35 in Oracle Financials/PPM to proceed with awards. These use A01465 for the Activity. For accounts that have a Foundation Number, please use Activity A01601. If the account does not have a Project Number or Foundation Number, please use activity A01465.

Example COAs
Foundation Fund: 1511-42795-A01601-BC35-78-000-0000000000-0000000000-00000000
Non-foundation/C&G fund: 1511-53715-A01465-BC35-78-000-0000000000-0000000000-00000000
Contract & Grant fund: 1511-21100-A01465-BC35-78-000-K011789002-0000000000-00000000
If funding already exists within Financial Aid’s accounts, please add “N/A” on this field.

How Financial Aid Processes Your Request

When a scholarship/stipend gets processed through Financial Aid, every effort is made to ensure the student can see some of this funding, within the federal regulations we operate under.  

These are the three possible outcomes that may happen when we award your source of funding to the student: 

1. Refund: A student may receive a refund if they do NOT have an existing balance on their Student Account. FA may be able to award the full amount of the scholarship/stipend however if the student has a balance on their Student Account, then their award will be used to pay down or pay off the balance first. The Student Business Services Office will determine if the student can be refunded or if the new award will be used to pay off an existing balance. If a credit still remains, then the Student Business Services Office can refund it. 
2. Reduce loan debt: When processing the new source of funding into the financial aid offer, it could require reducing loans to fit the scholarship in. Although the student may not receive a refund, this is still a positive outcome as it is reducing a student’s indebtedness.
3. Revision of other grant funding: If needed, Financial Aid will exercise this option. This would mean that Financial Aid will reduce a grant to add in the scholarship/stipend, dollar for dollar.
4. Return the funding: Financial Aid will exhaust all available options before getting to this step. However, when a student is maxed out on their Financial Aid (i.e. they have received financial aid up to their cost of attendance) and there are no other adjustments available to make, then Financial Aid will not be able to add the award. Financial Aid will return the funding to the scholarship donor/campus department/academic unit.

Contact Information

Fiscal/funding:
Alexandra Mayer, Fiscal Analyst
Cesar Lopez, Fiscal Manager

Scholarship awarding and processing:
Monica Martinez-Daniels, Scholarship Manager

Work-Study

In this section you'll find information about the hiring process for work-study students. You may contact workstudy@ucr.edu for more information for the topics below.

Onboarding

Once students have been offered a work-study position, they'll need to fill out the Work-Study New Hire Form so that it may kick off the onboarding process by sending out a Work-Study Student Employment Contract via DocuSign. This DocuSign envelope will ask students and/or supervisors to submit the following:

• Student Employment Contract — requires signatures from both student and supervisor
• Federal Work-Study Eligibility Notification — so that supervisors know a student is indeed eligible for work-study and can see the amount they were awarded (to help with tracking later)
• A copy of the job description/posting from Handshake

You can review samples of the documents named above in this PDF. 

Once this process is complete, a member of UCR’s Financial and Administrative Support Team (FAST) will contact the student to schedule an in-person or virtual onboarding appointment. The student will have to submit a new DocuSign packet. Once the FAST representative has finished processing and updating UCPath, they'll notify the work-study program that the student is ready to start working. Work-study representatives will email the student and supervisor when the student may start working. You must wait to receive the Letter of Clearance before your student can start working.

Payroll

Students are paid on a bi-weekly basis. Please review the payroll calendar so that you can help ensure your student's timesheets are submitted by the due date. You'll want to submit them by the dates in the column titled “Employee Cutoff.” Please note that some pay periods have early cutoffs. Work-study representatives will send e-mail reminders for off campus work-study supervisors, however, please make note of these dates.

Timesheets are required to be approved by the supervisor. For on-campus supervisors, please submit your student’s timesheet as normal through Time and Attendance Reporting System (TARS). For off-campus supervisors, work-study representatives will process through the UCR Time and Attendance Reporting System once they receive an emailed copy of the student's timesheet that has been signed by the supervisor. Please share this timesheet infographic with your students if they need help in understanding the process and how to fill out their timesheet.

How to Become a Work-Study Partner and Hire UCR Students

For more information on how to become a work-study partner and/or how to hire a UCR student, please visit the Career Center’s webpage.  On-campus employers can get additional information about work-study on this page. Information for off-campus employers is available on this page.

Increases to Work-Study Allocation

When there is available work-study funding, students may ask for increases to their work-study award by filling out a “revision request” through the Financial Aid icon in R’Web . If that option is not displaying in R’Web, please email our office at finaid@ucr.edu.