You may have heard the terms Banner or Ellucian Banner around campus, but just what do those terms mean?
Banner is the university's ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, meaning it's the centralized system that supports St. Edwards in its operational tasks. Tasks ranging from awarding financial aid, helping a student register for classes or paying the university's bills are done in Banner.
The university utilizes Banner, provided by Ellucian, a company specializing in education software. You may also hear the terms SSB (or Self-Service Banner or Banner Self-Service) or Application Navigator (App Nav); these represent interfaces for Banner's user interaction. Generally, individuals use SSB when they're using Banner, but staff and faculty with elevated data access use Application Navigator.
Banner is divided into several modules, each aligning with different divisions at St. Edwards.
- Banner Student: Contains student, course and other academic data, facilitating advising, course scheduling, registration, grading and other academic activities at the university.
- Banner Student Accounts Receivable: A subset of Banner Student employed to track students' bills for tuition, housing and other fees.
- Banner Financial Aid: Utilized by Student Financial Services to track the financial aid packages provided to students, manage their scholarshipswork-study awards, and provide student financial reports to the federal government.
- Banner Human Resources: Stores employee data, including information about faculty, staff and student workers, and helps HR manage processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.
- Banner Finance contains the university's financial, accounting and budget data. Finance and Administration use it to manage bill payments, track university expenses, stay within our budget and address other financial matters.
- Banner Advancement: Used by the university's Advancement division to track alumni and manage donors and donations to the university.
Related Tools
Alongside Banner, we use several other Ellucian products to support university business.
- Recruit CRM: The Admission office uses Ellucian's Recruit CRM, alongside Banner Workflow, to track applicants, review their application files and grant admission to St. Edwards.
- Banner Document Manager: Banner Document Manager is used to store scanned documents, including high school transcripts, requests for academic or schedule adjustments, and alumni donation information, along with other documents of that nature.
- Degree Works: Degree Works is the university's degree audit and academic advising and planning system.
Additionally, we use the following Evisions products to report and format data from our Ellucian and Banner products.
- Argos: Argos allows departments to run reports against Banner data, often combining them with other Banner functionality for workflows or other similar tasks. For in-depth analytics and reporting, Institutional Effectiveness and Planning has a robust toolkit.
- FormFusion: FormFusion is used by several departments to generate email or letter communications automatically to employees and students.