Preparing For Your First TCSI Report

The Tertiary Collection of Student Information or TCSI (pronounced 'taxi') is a joint project between the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (department) and Services Australia to transform how student information is collected.


The VETtrak 21.1 update provides you with all of the functionality required to start reporting via TCSI - but is important to get this process done in the correct way.

VETtrak 21.1 will available on request from early February.

Prior to updating you will need to submit any final VSL reporting using VETtrak 20.4 for the previous month via the HIEMS system prior to updating to 21.1. HIEMS Reporting is no longer available in VETtrak 21.1. See our related article for more information:

On updating to 21.1, VETtrak will update your existing data to the new TCSI standard in readiness for TCSI reporting. It is likely that there will be updates required to existing data before the live reporting process can commence, for example some some new information will be required for the first time as there are new reporting fields for the TCSI system. 

As part of TCSI onboard, TCSI require you to validate that the data they have migrated from the HEIMS system is correct. You should also cross check your data extract from TCSI to the migrated information in VETtrak after updating to 21.1. You are entitled to a single data extract from the TCSI system on transitioning. We suggest you obtain that immediately after your final data migration from HEPCAT to TCSI is ready for viewing and use that to verify that your VETtrak records match. We have some new standard reports available in VETtrak 21.1 that you can use to help with that process. 

 

This video will guide VETtrak you through the specific actions required to accomplish your first TCSI report.

 

Most questions raised in the session were addressed in the video, however the following discussion points require further explanation.

Reporting Units of Study with a date in the future.

This question arose because there is a difference in the way Units of Study are reported in TCSI system compared to the HIEMS system. Under HIEMS UoS were only reported once the Census Date has been reached. Under TCSI they are expecting that data to be collected with 5 business days of the information being known (or monthly if your reporting period has been made monthly).

On migrating to TCSI reporting you will need to upload any Units of Study that had not previously been reported under HIEMS. In practice this might be any Unit of Study wit a date greater than your TCSI go-live date.

In practice this will only be an issue on migration as any new Units of Study created in VETtrak will be automatically included for reporting to TCSI (in fact so will these records once their Completion Status is upgraded.

 

Solution

To make a record reportable, VETtrak needs to think that a record has been "changed" and therefore included in the next batch of data sent to TCSI.

In order to that for a Unit of Study, simply locate the Unit of Study in the Client Manager, open the unit of study and step through the wizard until your reach Finish.

 

 


If the Send data to TCSI checkbox was enabled: 


Then VETtrak will attempt to send it immediately, otherwise the record will be among the records presented for the next Upload (See Utility menu->VET Student Loans ->Upload to TCSI).

The above process will work for a small number of units of study but if you have a larger number then it may be best to use Data Insights. There is a link below to a sample Data Insights query, you could use for this purpose, you will need to change the date in the query criteria to use your actual date of your last HIEMS report. Run this query to display a  list of clients with a Census Date into the future to display a list as shown below: 


Click on the button highlighted to edit the Unit of Study record and repeat for each item in the list.  

You could also use the new built in Standard Report (VET Student Loans->VSL TCSI Data Reconcile Report) to generate a list of all Units of Study on VETtrak. Any records that have a census date greater than your go-live date will not have a value in the UID7 Column.

 

Documentation

There is a link to our VETtrak 21.1 release notes available in articles in our Help Centre, consolidated here:

Errors

These are errors we come across from time to time.

500 Errors

These are likely to be caused by the fact that your TCSI account is still in read only mode.

You need to wait until a message has been received from the TCSI team like the one shown below:


Once you have received that message try uploading again. If the errors persist see if you can identify the reason from the TCSI error list available on the https://www.tcsisupport.gov.au/validations-download page.

 


For detailed information visit the Transitioning to TCSI page on the TCSI support website.

Did you find it helpful? Yes No

Send feedback
Sorry we couldn't be helpful. Help us improve this article with your feedback.
×