Departmental Award Web System (DAWS)

Information on this page is intended for Illinois faculty, administrators, and staff who have responsibility for processing scholarships, grants, prizes, and awards.

The U.S. Department of Education requires that the amount of any scholarship, grant, prize, or award be considered as a resource in the student’s financial aid package and may impact other aid previously awarded to a student. All scholarships, grants, prizes, and awards (excluding nonqualified foreign national payments) must be processed through DAWS to ensure compliance with these federal financial aid requirements.

Two types of access are available for DAWS. Users can request access to have the ability to enter awards into the system or approve awards into the system. In order to comply with university policies, the person who enters the award isn’t permitted to approve the award. Therefore, it’s necessary for every unit that processes scholarships, grants, prizes, or awards to have at least 2 DAWS users. One user must have award entry access and the other user must have award approval access.

All current and new users of DAWS must complete and submit the appropriate security access form to our office by email or by fax to 217-244-6589:

Information entered into DAWS is loaded into Banner on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings and disbursed to the student’s university account through the Banner disbursement process. To find out more about processing periods, review our Fall 2023 DAWS Processing Schedule and Spring 2024 DAWS Processing Schedule.

Need help using DAWS? Review our DAWS User Guide.