Determining Form 486 Approval
Message Posted August 5, 2005
Although several Year 8 (2005) funding waves have been sent, and applicants should be filing their 486s, the SLD has not yet begun to issue Form 486 approval letters. We understand that those approval letters will be mailed in the next few weeks, but just because they aren't mailing these letters doesn't mean they haven't processed and approved your Form 486.
If you have been funded in Year 8 and have submitted your Form 486, you can determine if it has been processed and approved by using the SLD's Data Retrieval Tool (DRT). This can be especially helpful if your service providers are awaiting the 486 approval letter in order to begin discounting bills or providing service.
To use the DRT, follow the detailed instructions below. (Please note that the DRT contains a wealth of information about your funding requests (not just the 486 information. For a complete description of each column name, go to: http://www.sl.universalservice.org/funding/opendatasearch/fieldnames.asp).
If you have any questions about the 486 approval or the DRT, please let me know!
-- Julie
DRT Download Instructions
1. Go to: www.sl.universalservice.org
2. Select "Data Requests" on left toolbar (under the Tools heading).
3. The next page has instructions... simply choose "Clicking here" in the third paragraph.
4. Choose the Year and State you want to view, and then your Billed Entity Number. Then click on ">>Select Data Points" at the bottom of the page.
5. On the next page, select the datapoints you would like to include in your spreadsheet. (It’s easiest to simply check, “Select All” and then refine your date in your spreadsheet later.) Then click on “Build Date File!” at the bottom of the screen.
6. The database will be compiled, and when it is done, you will see a blue box that says "Download Data File."
7. RIGHT click on the box and select "Save Target As." You will be asked for a name and location of the file. Don’t forget where you saved it to! A good methodology is to have a folder already created called SLD Data, then you can just save the file to that folder, and name it something unique with each download. Such as ‘2005 SLD Data Aug 9’ as the file name, saved to the SLD Data folder. The file will be saved as a Text File.
8. Open Excel or other spreadsheet program, and then open the file that you just downloaded. (Remember, it was a text file, so don't look for it saved as a spreadsheet yet. It will be saved as .txt)
9. When it opens, it will show you a mini-tutorial on how you want the data to look on the screen. Simply select "Finish" and it will show it formatted to the columns you need. There is no need to complete the tutorial.
10. At this point, you will see all FRN data for applications submitted WITHIN THE WINDOW for that particular funding year, for that billed entity that you listed on the first screen.
11. To view only particular information, click on the arrow beside the column of data you are interested in. Choose the information you want to see and the spreadsheet will automatically be narrowed to include only rows that contain that piece of data.
-- If you want to know whether a 486 has been submitted, go to column P, Service Start Date 486. If this is blank, the 486 has not yet been submitted. If it has been submitted, it likely will say 07/01/2005, the earliest date to receive discounts for Year 8.
-- If you chose the 2004 data on the SLD website, you probably want to know whether an entity has any funding remaining to be collected or invoiced for Year 7. To find this out, go to column AW "Authorized Disbursement Amount". If a cell is blank, a BEAR or service provider’s SPIF has not been submitted for that particular funding request. If there IS an amount listed, be careful to check that all months have been invoiced if the FRN is for a recurring service. For example, if your local telephone commitment was $10,000, but column AW only lists $4,500, the entity likely submitted a BEAR for 6 months worth of funding and still needs to invoice the SLD for the remaining amount that you've spent. Please keep in mind that if they were committed $X, but only spent $Y, you can only collect $Y. $X would simply be your funding CAP.
12. Please note that this is not a static file... it’s updated nightly. So re-download a new database from the SLD website after or before certain times, such as after a wave is distributed, or the submission deadlines for the 471, 486, and invoices.
Julie Tritt Schell
jtschell@comcast.net
(717) 730.7133 (voice)
(717) 730.9060 (fax)
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