Award payments

Please be reminded that all award and departmental support payments to U of T graduate students must be processed through ROSI – not through HRIS or Student Accounts/Receivables. This includes external cheques, wire transfers, and one-off tuition payments. For more information, please see the sections below. Business Officers who do not have access to ROSI are encouraged to speak to their graduate unit administrators or Faculty awards payment administrators to coordinate payments.

New staff responsible for setting up payments for students are encouraged to contact Janine Harper for training on ROSI payment processing.

Supervisor (stipendiary) payments

Supervisor stipendiary payments to students are normally paid through HRIS. However, graduate units and Faculties wishing to provide one-time-only or stipendiary payments from supervisor funds do have the option to issue these funds through ROSI. To do so, graduate units will need to have a new AFS ID created in ROSI and linked to a designated FIS account (if one does not already exist). Please contact the Graduate Awards Office at graduate.awards@utoronto.ca for information on establishing an award record and creating the necessary AFS ID for processing.

External award payments

Graduate units who receive award cheques or questions regarding cheques or wire transfers from external funding agencies are asked to contact Fong Di Caterina at fong.dicaterina@utoronto.ca to arrange transfer of the funds to SGS for distribution to students via ACORN/ROSI. Grants specifically applied to research expenses must go through the Research Services Office by having the student’s supervisor submit an MRA.

Payments to new international students who have not arrived in Canada

International students will only be able to access their funds by direct deposit after they have a Canadian bank account set up on ACORN.

Refund cheques for students with an international mailing address on ACORN will not be sent by mail. Instead, these cheques will be held by Student Accounts, University Registrar’s Office. Students can claim refund cheques held by Student Accounts by following the instructions posted on the Student Accounts website.

Student awards pending payments list

On the day following processing (e.g., on Tuesday morning following the Monday night payment run), a report titled the Student Awards Pending Payments List(commonly known as the “error report”) is saved to a folder in your ROSI Files. This key report lists all award instalments that the system was unable to process because of an error or expired student information. This report should be checked after every payment processing day.

Retroactive cancellations

Award Administrators are asked to ensure that award cancellations (credit memos) are submitted to Student Receivables at studentar@utoronto.ca by December 11, 2025, or at the very latest by the end of January. Doing so will ensure that they have an accurate file to send out for the printing and mailing of students’ T4As for the year. Updates to T4As for the previous calendar year are still possible after January of each year, but they are administratively more challenging to process, and if they are delayed for too long, students may also be required to make amendments to their income tax returns.

For payments that were incorrectly set up to pay down tuition instead of being refunded, please note, refunds can only be requested on credit balances. If a refund is required for award amounts that originally went to pay down tuition on ROSI, the payment will need to be reversed by sending a credit memo to Student Receivables, and then re-entered as a new instalment to be issued as a refund on ROSI.

Retroactive payment processing

Award instalments may be retroactively entered on ROSI for up to two sessions prior to the current session. Normally, award journal sessions older than one year are closed and payments will not be processed if entered on ROSI; however, these sessions may be temporarily re-activated with Faculty approval. To request a temporary re-activation of the award journal session, email a request to Janine Harper at janine.harper@utoronto.ca at least 72 hours in advance of the requested processing date.

Important: T4As record income for the calendar year in which payments are processed, even if they were retroactively entered for a session in a previous year on ROSI. For example, if a 20249 instalment is journaled in 2025, the income will be reported to the CRA for the 2025 tax year, and the amount will be included in the student’s 2025 T4A when it is issued. Therefore, if a student is issued a payment retroactive to the previous calendar year but is no longer registered in a degree program as of the year of payment, the funds will likely be considered as taxable income. Graduate units are asked to take this into consideration when determining amounts and processing these types of retroactive payments as students may end up with an unexpected tax amount owing after they file their income tax returns.

Payment processing schedule for Fall 2025

Please note that payment processing ends early in both the Fall and Winter sessions. The last payment processing date for these sessions can occur as early as the second or third Monday of the last month. These deadlines are set by the Office of Student Receivables and Accounting Office (SRAO) to ensure that award payments will be fully processed across all systems before the December holiday closure and the end of the fiscal year. Award payments that are set up on ROSI after the last sessional payment processing date will not be disbursed until the first processing date of the next session.

*Subject to change upon confirmation from SRAO.

Direct deposit refunds are issued the day after each ROSI processing date. Cheque refunds are issued once a week.

Contact

For questions regarding award payments, retroactive processing and / or the Student Awards Pending Payments List, please contact Janine Harper at janine.harper@utoronto.ca.