A Bird's-Eye View
CARS is designed for building and accepting online applications, facilitating online reviews, and tracking of decisions for both monetary and non-monetary requests.
CARS supports review processes for:
- Grants or scholarships
- Funding applications (events, initiatives, programs...)
- Proposals
- Petitions
- Program applications
The committee review option in CARS makes it a very powerful platform for one or multi-step review workflows.
The 6 Primary Features of CARS
- Applications Forms - customizable online application forms
- Reviews - online committee review
- Decisions - tracking of decisions
- Email - bulk or individual notifications
- Funding - expenditure tracking for monetary awards
- Data Security - CARS supports P3 data protection level content
Overview of Features
Application Forms
- Easily create custom application forms
- Specify open & close dates
- Set eligibility criteria
- Allow multiple applications per person or limit to one
The Applicant Experience
Applicants can
- Submit new or view previous applications
- Save a formatted PDF of their application
- View application decisions
- Avoid lost work with auto-save
- Save work in progress and return before submitting for review
Reviews
- Create custom questions for reviewers
- Quantify evaluations with scoring questions
- Assign reviewers to applications either
- Manually
- Based on workflow rules
Decisions/Awards
- Create custom fields to track decision information
- Track expenditures against a budget in real time as award decisions are made
Email
- Send bulk notifications of approvals or denials
- Use mail-merge variables to personalize messages
- Save email templates
Budget Tracking (for monetary awards)
- Monitor remaining funds available as each award is made
- Associate requests with FOAPALS to facilitate transfer of expense
Data Security - P3
The CARS system meets data security at the P3 level, which generally includes Institutional Information and related IT Resources whose unauthorized disclosure or modification could result in small to moderate fines, penalties or civil actions (Proprietary). Examples of data requiring P3 protection include:
- Student Education Records (FERPA)
- IT Security Info and Plans
- UC Personnel Records
- Attorney-Client Privileged Information
- Research classified as P3 by the IRB
More information about data security and protection levels, as well as links to other resources, can be found on the IT Policy web page -
Protection Levels for UC Institutional Information