Policy & Fee Process

Board of Regents Policies

All student fees must follow the University's rules. Fees should be used to support student services and must be approved each year. Review the Board of Regents Policy: Tuition and Fees before starting. Important sections to note:

Section III, Subdivision 5, Letter (e) outlines fees that are in lieu of tuition.
Section IV lists the policies for the different types of allowable fees.

Fees are not just accounting transactions. When setting fees, always think about the “actual cost and the impact to students.” A full list of Board of Regents Policies is also available.

Budget Office Guidelines

Before entering or approving fees, review the Budget Office’s instructions. These resources add to the Regents Policies and explain how to correctly submit fees. Every year, fees must be approved by the Regents along with the University’s budget.

You can find these documents on the Budget Office website under the "Student Fee Requests" heading:

Administrative Fee Guidelines - How to create term fees.
Course Fee Guidelines – Rules about course fees and examples of what is allowed.
Off-Cycle Fee Guidelines – The rules for and how to request a fee after the normal approval time.

Fee Request Process Overview

Individual University departments enter fee requests into TFMS. Most fees that are assessed to students should be entered into TFMS. Contact Emily Larson in the Budget Office for any questions about whether to enter a fee.

Departments route fees to Resource Responsibility Center (RRC) managers for approval. In some cases, the department enterer and RRC manager may be the same. RRC managers (or designees) then route the fees to the Budget Office for review. The Budget Office gathers the fees and prepares them for submission to the Board of Regents. The Board of Regents give the final approval. After fees are approved, they are loaded into PeopleSoft.

Note: Get approval of any new tuition rates before entering them into TFMS. Contact the Budget Office with any questions.

Timeline

Submit your fee requests on time in TFMS. Generally, the timeline of the fee process is:

January: Budget & planning guidelines released.
February - April: Departmental fee preparation.
April - May: Budget Office & leadership review.
May - June: Regents review & final approval.

Submit your fee requests on time using TFMS. Late submissions may not be approved. They require additional justification. Guidelines for Off-Cycle Fee Requests are available on the Budget Office website.

Roles, Statuses, and Workflow

The workflow process in TFMS takes into consideration both the status of the fee and the role of the user.

A user's role determines what actions you can take in TFMS.
The status indicates where the fee is in the request and approval process.

All fees start at "In development," and the goal is for fees to end with a status of “Fit for use.” Except for "Archived," you may see a fee circle through the statuses multiple times. For example, if a course is added to a fee, the status will reset to "Ready for SF-IT." It will then move through the workflow until it is again "Fit for use."

Review the "Comments" on the fee for notes about why a fee is in a particular status. Contact SFHelp@umn.edu if you have questions about why a fee is not in the "Fit for use" status.

The table below displays the TFMS fee statuses in the order they appear in the workflow.

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