News & Updates sent June 11, 2021

Posted on June 11th, 2021

Dear College Community,

As we come to the end of the 2020‐2021 academic year, I am reflecting on all of the exceptional and tremendous work we have done to serve both our current and future students. Thank you for your service to our students and community.

Skagit Valley College’s ctcLink team has been preparing for the Summer and Fall quarters’ ctcLink activities. I would like to give you the dates and deadlines of activities for processing our business transactions during Fall Quarter. The dates and deadlines noted below were developed based on collaboration between State Board and Skagit Valley College input, as well as lessons learned from the colleges that have already gone live with ctcLink. These dates and deadlines will also be posted to the employee portal soon.

Slowdowns in key departments

You can expect service slowdowns in the following areas over the next three months:

Enrollment Services (Admissions/Registration)
Cashiering
Financial Aid
Business Office
Purchasing
HR/Payroll
Instruction Office

Staff in these areas will be working long days, late nights, and every weekend to ensure the conversion to the new system goes as smoothly as possible.

Cutoff dates

Our current legacy system will be completely unavailable: Thursday, October 7th‐ Sunday, October 10th

In order to fully prepare for the conversion, many offices will have earlier service cutoffs.

A few high‐profile shutdowns:

CUT-OFF EVENT	DATE	DESCRIPTION
PURCHASING CUTOFF	9/10/2021	Last day to use PCards for purchases, including Amazon, Office Depot, NAPA and other purchases on Accounts.
	9/22/2021	Last Day to submit PRs/Invoices/Travel & Expense for payments.
HUMAN RESOURCES	9/16/2021	Last approved start date for exempt, classified, full-time faculty, new hires.
	9/20/2021	Last approved start date for hourly/student and associate faculty new hires.
	9/24/2021	Last day for managers and employees to submit employee/job changes.
STUDENT SERVICES	9/29/2021	Last date to finalize and disburse financial aid and all student funding transactions in our current system.
CASHIERING	9/29/2021	Last day to take any student payments or post any student financial activity in the cashiering system.
OFFICES CLOSED OR LIMITED HOURS/SERVICES	10/11/2021 – 10/22/2021	See the full cutoff and go-live calendar here on the portal soon.

If you have questions about whether something you are working on will be directly affected, please reach out to the ctcLink Pillar Lead in your area to ask questions and come up with workarounds. It is best to do so as soon as possible so that we can look into possible solutions, as options will be more limited in September/October.

Go‐Live on ctcLink – October 11, 2021

Over the summer, many of our colleagues will be engaged in training and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of ctcLink. UAT provides an opportunity for Skagit Valley College’s system users to explore ctcLink’s features and determine how best to use those features after Go‐Live. This process allows system users to use ctcLink before it is deployed and to collaborate with departments throughout the College on how we will change the way we do business. This work may create delays in responses as the teams are focused on this work.

Please join me in thanking those who are working throughout the summer to make sure our transition to ctcLink will be seamless! Questions and feedback regarding ctcLink can be sent to ctcLinkInfo@skagit.edu.