Starting 1 January 2017 the Federal Government introduced two significant changes in processing of VET FEE‑HELP loans: eCAF and VET Student Loans. Avaxa has developed Strata functionality to manage those changes and enable efficient and effective processing of both the eCAF applications and VET Student Loans. This functionality is available in Strata Release 4.2, in time for 2017 student enrolments. One of the exciting and financially beneficial capabilities added in this release is the management of Remaining Skills First Funded Hours. This enables accurate calculation of the number of training delivery hours which the RTO can claim for from the Government prior to enrolment. Other changes

Courses delivered under Skills First have a cap on the maximum number of funded hours that an RTO can claim. The Remaining Skills First Funded Hours Calculation functionality provides tools to compare every student’s enrolled hours against the maximum funded hours cap. Where a student is enrolling in more hours than funded, this excess is identified and action can be taken to limit exposure to non-funded delivery.

An eCAF is an Electronic Commonwealth Assistance Form which is required to be completed by eligible students wishing to use VET Student Loans, HECS-HELP or FEE-HELP for the payment of their tuition fees. STRATA now provides full electronic integration with the new Government eCAF for seamless creation and submission of an eCAF without any intervention by the training organisation's staff.

The Federal Government VET Student Loans commenced on 1 January 2017, replacing the VET FEE‑HELP scheme, which ceased on 31 December 2016. VET Student Loans assist eligible students enrolled in higher level VET courses to pay their tuition fees. STRATA now provides two way integration via a set of APIs with the Australian Government eCAF system. This enables management of activities such as registration of the need for a new eCAF, checking the status of an eCAF, marking eCAF as processed/unprocessed, and the like. For RTO users this means Strata is a single location for managing students eCAFs so that funding arrangements are compliant with Government legislation and students are certain the