July 2006  
 
 

In This Issue: (click on the links below to access each article)



New ECSI Clients
ECSI would like to welcome the following colleges/universities to the ECSI family. We look forward to working with each of these new clients for years to come.

The California State University System (23 Schools)
Charleston Southern University
Cuyahoga Community College
George Fox University
Kentucky Christian University
Southern College of Optometry
The University of Evansville
The University of Oklahoma
The University of Tennessee - Chattanooga
William Woods University


Latest System Enhancements
At ECSI, we strive to make everyone’s job as easy and stress free as possible. As you know, our programmers are constantly making updates and improvements to our systems based on suggestions and insight from all of our clients. The following are the latest enhancements to the SAL System:

Two New Search Buttons Added
The left and right arrow buttons on both sides of the "Search" button allows the user to search chronologically by account number going forward or backwards. Left and right arrow buttons have been added to the Primary Window directly after the Name field to allow the user to search alphabetically by name either going forward or backwards as well.

Floating TPP Fund Added
ECSI has added a "floating" TPP fund. A standard TPP fund starts on a set month and year and ends on a set month and year with a fixed term. The "floating" TPP fund can start in any given month and year and can have a term from 1 to 24 months.

Archive Account Search Enhanced
When you click on the "Archive" button in the search options, the archive search window will now let you search on SSN and SID. Before you could only search by name.

Applying Payments for ORCC, Checkfree, Metavante, etc.
These companies give us payments electronically but don’t always know or do not always give us the borrower’s school number. The programs use the name search files to find a match of the social security number or SID number and to find out what school the payment should be applied to. 99% of the time this works fine, but 1% of the time a borrower may be enrolled in two different schools and the payment would just be applied to the first school that the system finds. A payment should be applied first to a TPP debt instead of a Perkins loan, but it might not have worked out that way based on what school number was found first. The payment programs will now look at four different search files in this order to find out where the payment should be applied first:

  1. TPP file - all TPP debts that would have an in-out code of 3 or 4.
  2. Active file - all other debts that would have an in-out code of 1, 2 or 3.
  3. SID file - if SSN number fails on (a) and (b), the programs will check for a valid SID.
  4. PIF file - all debts that would have an in-out code of 4, 5 or 6.

Additional ACH Draw Day Added
We are now able to draw ACH on the 1st, 10th, 15th and 20th of each month.

return to MAIN >
  

Latest ECSI News

After the success of this year’s Annual User’s Conference, we have already scheduled our 2007 ECSI User’s Conference. Next year’s Conference will be held June 4-6, 2007 at the Sheraton Station Square in Pittsburgh, PA. We hope you will all set aside these dates and plan to attend.

This year, we welcomed our first K-12 school to the ECSI family, Winchester Thurston. They are a private school located here in Pittsburgh and are a new Tuition Payment Plan (TPP) client. Winchester Thurston is paving the way for more K-12 clients as our business continues to grow in this new market.

Just a reminder, ECSI has a new fax number. The new number is 866-291-5384. Through a company called My Fax, all incoming faxes are now converted to PDF files and received via email. The new fax process automatically forwards faxes from the old 412-494-5626 number. Please be sure to update this important contact information.

ECSI would like to send out a welcome to all of our new clients who recently converted to ECSI at the start of this fiscal year. These clients include: The University of Oklahoma, George Fox University, Kentucky Christian University, Charleston Southern University, The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, and The California State System. We welcome you all to the ECSI family, and we look forward to working with each of you!