Product Benefits
- Reduces Labor Costs. FA~Link eliminates manual processes and costly errors that must be tracked and reconciled by your staff.
- Fast, Reliable, Proven. FA~Link is fast and reliable with a robust feature set that is enhanced each year based on our customer’s requests.
- Accounts Receivable & Point-of-Sale workflow. Created with Datatel’s Envision programming language. Configuration allows FA~link to map to your College workflow.
- No IT expertise required. No large project plan or QA budget needed. You simply download the software to your system from the Datatel repository, and we configure it. You are up and running in no time. Business and technical training is delivered on-site.
- Automatic Updates and Feature Enhancements. Trimdata partners with Datatel to provide up to-date releases for FA~Link that align with Datatel’s cycle. Enhancements to keep current with Datatel software or underlying platforms are part of the on-going support that comes with FA~Link.
- A Datatel partner for 15 years. Trimdata has been serving college campuses for more than 15 years.
FA~Link Colleague to Bookstore Interface
FA~Link is a real-time, two-way interface allowing students to use Financial Aid and Sponsorship funds set up in Colleague directly at the bookstore cash register.
Students may purchase their books as soon as they are registered for classes, or as soon as your campus rules allow. Charges are authorized in real‐time and an invoice is created on the student account in Colleague, so both systems are in balance at all times.
Manual processes and paper vouchers are eliminated. The Business Office does not need to manage and reconcile paper, spend hours tracking down discrepancies and fixing errors, and creating invoices manually in Colleague. The bookstore staff does not need to know which students can charge and which cannot because their POS system will tell them.
The students are better served because they don’t have to go from place to place on campus to get their book voucher or wait until they receive their Financial Aid checks. Studies show that students that have their books for the start of their courses have higher retention rates. Bookstore sales usually increase because the student funds are available only at the on-campus bookstore which encourages students to buy there rather than other sources.
Because FA~Link is real-time rather than a batch system, the two sides are never out of balance. A student cannot go to the bookstore multiple times in one day to trick the system. Each trip to the bookstore initiates a new conversation with Colleague for the most recent A/R picture of that student, including new invoices on their account, new aid amounts available, any new restrictions on that aid, add/dropping of classes, etc. There is no lag time – all information is up-to-date.
FA~Link is an optional module in Datatel’s Colleague system. It is licensed through Trimdata, and the software is delivered through the Datatel repository. All our development is done on Datatel servers using native Datatel technologies. Software updates are released usually once or twice a year to maintain consistency with Colleague changes, and to add new features as requested by our customers.
