From Workarounds to Workflow: Six-Digit Loan Certification in ELMOne Is Here for Peak Season

Over the past few years, six-digit borrowing has become increasingly common in graduate and professional education. Because Direct Grad PLUS loans can be certified up to a student’s cost of attendance (minus other aid), higher-cost programs are seeing more loan requests that reach six-digit territory. 

Many long-standing industry file formats were originally designed with key amount fields capped at $99,999. When a loan exceeds that limit, schools may be forced to use time-consuming workarounds such as splitting amounts, tracking exceptions in spreadsheets, reconciling manually, and double-checking data across systems. 

Phase One of ELM’s Six-Digit Loan initiative is designed to reduce or eliminate many of those workarounds without disrupting the workflows schools already rely on for standard loan processing. It will be available for the upcoming peak processing, starting summer 2026, through the next-generation ELMOne. 

What Phase One delivers for schools 

Phase One focuses on making six-digit loans actionable in the next-generation ELMOne. 

What this means: We are actively working with many lenders to test their ability to initiate six-digit loans through file processing with ELMOne. 

Schools will be able to certify six-digit loans online in ELMOne. 

When a requested amount contains six digits, schools can view the loan record in ELMOne with the full, correct amount requested; no manual override required in ELMOne. 

This enhancement enables financial aid offices to review and manually certify six-digit loan amounts directly within ELMOne. 

Built-in tools to quickly find and manage six-digit loans 

To support financial aid offices during peak season, ELMOne will also support features such as: 

• Notifications on the homepage dashboard 

• Filters to quickly identify six-digit loans 

• Reporting that includes visibility into six-digit loans 

• Inclusion in the ELMNet Digest (for schools that use it) 

Just as important: Phase One does not require changes to current file workflows for loans that are not six-digit. All other loans can continue to be processed exactly as they are today, including file transfer. 

Does Phase One include file transfer for schools? 

The short answer: Not in Phase One. 

Many schools’ financial aid management systems (FAMS) and file-based workflows aren’t yet equipped to support six-digit loan values through a supplemental record approach. Rather than waiting for every system to evolve, Phase One enables campuses to process six-digit loans during peak season by using ELMOne as the primary workflow for managing these records. 

This approach is intentional as it gives schools a reliable way to review and certify six-digit loans now, while broader system integrations and file-based processing will be addressed in future phases. 

Need more details? 

Watch for our next post, where we will walk through exactly what teams will need to do in ELMOne when a six-digit loan arrives, step-by-step. 

If you have any questions, please contact us at nsc@elmresources.com, chat in ELMOne, or call 866-524-8198.