Hello and welcome to E-Rate What's New for 2017. I am Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I am officially my title is Library Development Consultant, which is a nice vague catch-all title. Just means I do a bunch of things in a library development department here at the Nebraska Library Commission. One of those things is I am the State E-Rate Consultant, State E-Rate Coordinator for public libraries in Nebraska. So I am the person here on staff who is available for training, to any consultation you need on doing your E-Rate, any questions, help, things you don't understand. That's my job. That's what I'm here for, for our public libraries in the state. This during today's webinar we are going to learn about E-Rate for the upcoming year. What things are new for 2017? Lots of things are very similar from last year and from the most recent couple of years some things are new here and there. More of an advancement of things that you already were into from the previous year. But we're going to start with a very basics of this of the program for anyone who is brand new to doing E-Rate and just as a refresher for those of you who have been doing it for years and years and years, it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of refresher of what exactly it's all about. So let's jump right in. We've got about two hours ish of information to go through. Maybe a little longer. Depends on how quickly I get through things and how many questions you guys have. So what is E-Rate? E-Rate is a federal program that gives discounts to public libraries and schools in the U.S. for the on the cost of your phone and your internet cost. This is anything internet related. The monthly bills and the construction you've done, wiring cables, same thing for telephone. If you need lines, run, all those kind of things. Anything telecommunications and internet related. The money for this program and it gives you a discount on your bills that you get. This isn't a loan program or a grant program. It's just an outright discount on how much you're paying. The money for this program comes from the universal service fee. This is one of those many taxes and fees that you pay on your bills, your phone bills and your internet bills. If you look at them, you'll see somewhere in there will be something that actually says universal service. Sometimes it's abbreviated USF, but everybody, both us as users and your telecommunication providers, your service is put money into this pot that is then divided up among schools and libraries in the to give them a discount. The FCC runs the program. They're the ones that in charge. They put out the rules. They tell you what you're supposed to do. When the program was first created, which was created from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was when this was dictated that this needed to be done. The Universal Service Administrative Company, USAC, was created to run the program. There's the program that is for schools and libraries, which is the schools and libraries division, which is for our public schools, K through 12 schools and our public libraries. There's also three other programs that they also run. There's one for health care providers and health care facilities, so they can get a discount on the same kind of services. And there's one for high cost areas. There's certain areas of the country where things are way more expensive, and there's one for more low income, a lifeline type program. We deal with the schools and libraries division of USAC who helps us. I usually talk about people as USAC, however, because that's who whenever you will be emailed or when you will get something in the mail, which doesn't happen too much anymore, but anytime they contact you, that's who they talk about them. So they say we are from USAC. So that is how I will talk about them throughout the whole presentation and whenever I talk to you guys about things. So as I said, the FCC sets the rules. The program has been in effect, as I said, from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The first year you could apply was in 1997 and then the first time people got monies was in 1998. So that would have been the first time anybody had money from this. Over the years, they've updated the rules and regulations five or six times. I believe I think the sixth report was the last one before this modernization one in 2014. So not every year do things change majorly, but whenever something does need to be updated, they do do something about it. They do pay attention. The big one though that did come up was this modernization report and order in 2014 and that's what changed a lot. This was a order to streamline, make things easy or make things simpler, make things online completely. So that's part of modernization. So there's no paper forms and things you're dealing with. It's been a hit or miss on how successful some of this has been done, but it's a work in progress. And we're going to go through all those things. Throughout the presentation, anything that is a result of this modernization order is in green text. I've tried to do that throughout the whole presentation. So you'll know things that are just the basics of what the program's always been as compared to what are the new things that are brand new since that 2014 order. So the FCC puts out these orders saying, here's how we want things done. And then USAC has to figure out, okay, now how do we actually take that and make it happen? With updating our forms, creating new websites, doing whatever they need to do. So who can apply for e-rate? Libraries and library systems in Nebraska, all public libraries are eligible to be to apply for e-rate. There is no, you don't have to be accredited in a special way. The only thing is being the only requirement and this comes from e-rate is being eligible for LSTA funding. And this comes down through the library commission actually, because we use LSTA funding to provide certain services to all public libraries in the state, you are then considered eligible for those funds as well because you benefit from something we're doing using those funds. So all public libraries, schools and school districts as well. And if we had consortiums, groups of schools, groups of libraries getting together, that would be something as well. As I said in the beginning, I handle public libraries in the state. So I am in charge of just having the libraries for the schools and school districts. Just so you guys know, there is the Nebraska Department of Education handles support and training for all of them. So they have a particular people on staff there that help all the schools. So for this session, of course, and for all of you guys who are at public libraries, we're all going to be public library related. Pretty much everything they do is very similar to what we do. It's all the same forms, but they do have some of their own little ways of having to deal with things and interpret the rules. So the Department of Education helps them out with that. So I don't have to figure out how to help them. So before you get into doing e-rate, I know many of you already have been doing it for years, but the first thing I always tell new libraries is figure out how much of a discount you can get. Calculate what your discount is going to be. See if it's going to be worthwhile for you to go through and participate in this program. E-rate is an ongoing program. There are forms you fill out throughout the year at certain times of the year. So it is something you have to keep up on and pay attention to and keep up with the deadlines. Every year when you do it, it's not something you can apply for once and you keep getting it. It is a thing that is each year you have to redo it. So you want to see if it's worth your while. So to calculate your discount, libraries, what you can get as a discount is anywhere from 20 to 90% off of your telephone and internet related costs. Most libraries in Nebraska fall in the 60, 70, 80% area. So pretty good. Definitely worth it, I would think, depending on how much time you have to go through all of these, the process. To figure out what your discount is, it is based off of the National School Lunch Program. That's the free and reduced lunches that the children get in schools. The FCC, USAC, decided they needed some way of determining what areas of the country, how much different areas should get. And they wanted some way of figuring out where the most needy areas and they decided there's many ways to determine who's needier, where's their higher poverty levels, things like that. They decided this is a good indicator of higher poverty levels. If there's more children who are eligible for the school lunch program, the free and reduced school lunch program, that's a needier area in the country most likely. We'll give them a slightly higher discount on their bills than people areas that have less. So that is where that comes from. It is specifically the school district in which the library building is physically located. Now you may serve, have students and people that come into your library that are from other school districts that are around you and that's fine. However, to calculate your discount you look geographically in which school district does the library building physically sit and those are the lunch, the numbers that you look at to calculate your discount. In addition, you can't include any pre-K kids. It's just a restriction they put on it. So it only would be kindergarten through 12th grade numbers. In addition to that, you combine that with the fact of whether you are urban or rural and this just comes from the city of US census. So to get these numbers, luckily for us the Department of Education puts post these every year. There is now there's a long link there. Don't try and scribble these down. You do have the power this presentation. All of these links also are available on my e-rate website that I have that you can go and look at and just click off to it. But luckily for us the Department of Education here in Nebraska every year posts the lunch numbers. So you can go there. They have a spreadsheet that lists every individual school, but there's also a separate tab that is the school districts all calculated up together, which is great. It tells you how many kids are enrolled in the school district, how many are eligible for the school lunch program, and then what that percentage is because that's what you need is the percentage to do your e-rate calculation. And something that's key to this is it's not how many children actually apply, it's how many are eligible. Not every family decides to participate in the program. So that would be a lower number potentially. So this is how many could possibly participate is what this is all about. In addition to that, then you see if your urban or rural status is USAC on their website. It has a place where you can look up your county and city and sea. And this is just based on the most recent, well, 2010 census data is what they've based it on. You take those two numbers and you use USAC's discount matrix, which is on the next page screen here, to figure out what your discount will be. Now you'll see here there is category one and category two and that's the different types of services that you can get an e-rate discount on. And I'm going to explain all of that, what the difference is. So that'll be coming. But you can see here the higher percentage of students eligible, the higher discount you get. And if you are rural it also is, for some levels, it is a higher discount as well. So they give their the rural areas a little bump. So you can see here, even if you have only 50 up to 49 percent, a little less than 50 percent of the student, of the children in your area are eligible, you can get anywhere from 60 to 70 percent off on your costs. Pretty good deal. We only have a few libraries I've seen in the state that do get up to 90 percent. I don't think I've seen anybody go below 40 in Nebraska. I'd have to double check. So it's a pretty, definitely a good thing to do.  It is 60 percent, you know, up to you. Now the e-rate funding year runs officially from July 1st of every year to June 30th of the next year. The funding year is the amount of time that you're applying for to get a discount on. So whenever you are applying for e-rate, you're actually thinking to the future. Thinking what I want to get a discount on what I've been, what I pay for my bills, but right now, in the fall of 2016, we are looking to apply for discounts that will start being reflected on our bills in July of next year. It's not the kind of thing where you're looking at, I just paid a bill and I want to get a refund on it. It doesn't work that way for the current bills. You would have applied last year for the current months. So you're always looking to the future when you're thinking about e-rate. So right now, you can actually start the process and I'm going to be showing you how to go through the steps to do that for a funding that you will start receiving in July. Sorry, I just need to grab this here of next year. All right. There's about 3.9 billion dollars is available. That's how much money is in the program at the moment. They do adjust it if necessary for inflation so that could vary of how much is available. Category one and category two funds are given out slightly differently and I'm going to get to a lot of details of that. Your category one is usually your basic monthly phone and internet bills, just the usual thing you pay for each month. Category two is generally everything extra construction, wiring, cabling, anything you need to get those services to the computers. They look at the category one applications first, fund them and then if there's still money left they go on to category two. So there's quite a big chunk of money that we're putting in here that is available. So what can you get e-rate discount on? Every year, what is e-rateable? I'm not sure if that's word but every year the FCC publishes what they call their eligible services list. This is a list of all the services programs, equipment, everything that you can get an e-rate discount on. They post it every year on their website and there's a link to it. I do have a link off our website for that as well and they actually have all the previous years as well. So always make sure you're looking at the list for the upcoming year to see what is eligible for you because they do change this list. They will add new services, add new things that have come up that they've learned about. If you will ask well what about this kind of a piece of equipment, what about this service, they will adjust the list appropriately and if you're looking to apply for 2017, starting in July of next year, you need to use the 2017 list to see what you're eligible for. Potentially something on the 2016 list might not be eligible anymore or something new wasn't on that one, it is on the new one. So always look at the most recent one. The eligible services list has been modified a huge amount over the years and a big change is made as you can see here based on the new, that new modernization order. Up until 2014 when that order was put out it was at least 50 pages long. I did 49 pages especially that year and it varied depending on how big the appendix was and whatever other things are adding to it. It was huge. It was unwieldy. It was hard to search through and find what is eligible, what isn't. Over the years they had put not just what is eligible but every time, many times when people are asked, well what about this? What about that? They had all sorts of explanations about what things weren't eligible. So there was things that are not eligible for irradiated in there. It was just ridiculous. So they said, as far as this order, you need to streamline it. Cut it down, make it easier for people to read through and figure out what can and can't I get and discount on. And they did in 2016. It went down to eight pages long and that's what it is for the current year as well. Much easier to look through and read and figure out is it or isn't. Pretty much what they've done is they taken out all those extra things of this special case and that special case and yes all these are the here's the three pages what's not eligible and just said this is which eligible and that's it. Don't ask, you know, you can ask about details and things but we're not going to put it in this list because that's just getting crazy for people to have to deal with it. As I said, it is divided into category one and category two services and the basic way you can think about them is they're split up by the walls of your building category one is getting the services connectivity to your building the actual as I said the monthly internet cost the monthly phone bill some minor construction that might be needed to get that connection certain special constructions to get those connections to the building category two is once you've got that service then how do you get it out to all the different computers and workstations in the building the wiring the servers the networking all of that related stuff that's how it falls generally into your category two is those types of things. Another big change that was made in the eligible services list is focusing on internet specifically Wi-Fi broadband any ways of getting internet the FCC had looked into what's going on out in the world and noticed as many of us do that internet across the country and many areas is not fast enough it is not strong enough as it should be they want it needs to be better and we all know there's lots of ways things going on to trying to increase the broadband across the country for FCC for area purposes is they want to do that as well they want to focus on only providing services to that providing discounts to that so a part and a way to do that is phasing out support actually for the telephone services so I have been mentioning that both internet and phone is available gradually though voice services your telephone is not going to be part of the program anymore and it has been since 2015 gradually being phased out each year they just provide a little less support for it and until there's no support at all and I've got some details about exactly how that works it has been a point of controversy however many large school districts large library systems had put when the FCC first suggested this they did put responses back to them saying this is not good this telephone is an essential service for us we need to have the support the discounts for it this is going to be a hardship on many schools and libraries if they cannot get that discount still on their telephone and FCC took that you know listened and said sorry though but we've decided to change the focus of e-rate to internet and looks like they're not going to back off on that so this is something you do have to think about with e-rate that if you have been getting a lot of telephone support it's gone it's already been going away and it's going to be gone completely by 2019 if you're getting internet that's fine that's good you still have the internet that's not changing at all that's where they're focusing on if you're only doing telephone you might want to start looking into applying for internet discount through e-rate to help make up for that I believe that's part of what e-rate was hoping libraries and applicants would do however I do know here in Nebraska and I'm sharing many other rural-type areas we have lots of service providers that provide internet access to our public libraries either for free or at a really good discount as a public service to the community so applying for an e-rate discount on a bill that you don't even pay is kind of a move point so just something to be aware of however in you know that's the bad side of it that we're losing it and the good side is it worked they had enough money in the last two years to fund all applications as I said before they fund the category one applications first and then if there's money left over still money they go to category two up until 2015 there was always announcements every year that okay category one is done and now we're only going to fund the category two up to the 80% discount meaning only libraries that have 80 or 90% discounts on their category two services would receive any funding meaning if you fill into the 60 50 40 you were just out of luck that was just how they had to do it because they did not have enough money to go around to do everything but they figure we'll give it to the neediest areas by phasing out the phone service they were able to fund every single application that was that was submitted correctly of course so it's working it is hard that a lot of us are losing the telephone support but what you what the FCC wanted to do in supporting broadband and internet and wi-fi and getting that more money to help libraries do that it worked so just keep that all in mind here is what is eligible for category one basically any way of getting internet broadband wi-fi to your library is eligible this isn't an exhaustive list this is just an example of some of the things you can look and see in the eligible services list more details so if you have cable modem dsl fiber lit and dark satellite service t1 lines any way that you get the internet to your library you can get a discount on that connection on that service fiber lit and dark fiber is been a little bit confusing to some people of what is the difference and what is it when fiber lines are laid have been laid over the years when they drink the trenches and put the lines in they put in more connections than they need at the time they knew there's going to be a demand more demand in the future and we don't want to have to dig another trench or dig this up and replace them over the years let's plan ahead and put it extra so they put in a whole bunch of fiber lines turn on some of them those are the lit ones and start using them later on in years as people say we want fiber now as well the dark fiber the ones that had not been turned on so they're off dark you can have those turned on so and then you pay you pay some sort of a fee to have them turned on and then use that as your connection in e-rate you'll see there's different choices for lit and dark fiber in the forms you're doing your application so keep that in mind when you know however you're getting your fiber if you're able to get it a third option is this self provisioned network which is a new way that some places are doing it now most of our libraries in Nebraska are you know all of our independent ones you probably guys probably would not do this but for larger organizations this is another choice you'll see when you're doing your form where the customer the library actually keeps runs it all themselves they just hire a vendor to do the construction and they own and maintain it themselves rather than going with a service provider out there it's an option like I said not for most of our typical live public libraries in Nebraska one other extra thing that you can get as category one that is construction related and this is they call it special construction and there's questions on the form to apply for that specifically this is the first time of getting your fiber installed they know this is a new thing that is you know people are doing and so they put it under the category one that if you have lit fiber dark fiber that you're turning on or self provisioned that you can get a discount on that as well and this would include the include the actual construction and any project management and design that needed to go along with that so if there's a company you had to hire or that your your city or county did those costs would be eligible under category one as well now onto the voice phase down each year since they decided to do this in 2014 the way rather than just cutting everyone off completely from voice services they're gradually reducing at 20 percentage points each funding year so your discount goes down 20 percent each year just for the voice this is not have anything to do with the internet so the first year 2015 you'll see here just the lowest levels started getting cut having no support right now we're in the year 2017 so only only institutions who have a 70 percent or higher discount rate are still receiving a discount on the telephone and that'll be your 10 20 or 30 percent next you'll just be the highest ones and by 2019 it's all gone completely so for some of you've already last year for example I submit an application for the Nebraska Library Commission every year for our telephone service and we are at a 60 percent discount rate based on the Lincoln public schools reduced lunch numbers and last year was my last my last time being able to do it I'm not submitting a form now for 2017 because we're down to zero and these are the particular for voice services that are included in that phase down any sort of your basic local long distance if you have 800 numbers any voice over IP satellite wireless any circuits that are dedicated to phone service all of these things that are considered part of voice services are what is being phased out so any questions up at this point about what do you rate is and category one we're going to go on to category two services next and type in your questions section at any time if you do all right category two category two this is the equipment construction services needed to get your internet into and throughout your library itself category one is pretty basic you pay a bill it's discounted that percentage category two they came up with a whole different way of providing the discount to the libraries what they call they've created what they call a five year budget now it's a budget in that you have to kind of think of it as not your typical budget as in here's some money we're going to give you and that's your budget and use it it's more of a pretend budget is how I describe it how I was able to explain it to myself when I had to figure out what they were talking about meaning there's this amount of money that we're going to a lot to you that you can get use as you can discount your your bills from and we're just going to track it and every year we'll give you some discount over off of things over the five years and I've got some concrete examples coming up that makes that explains this a little better category two services are just are broken up into internal connections wiring cabling all the things inside the library a new thing managed internal broadband services which I've got an example of and then basic maintenance of those internal connections basically the ongoing service and maintenance and updating of them so these are the eligible internal connections that are out there that that you can get that would fall in category two this is as you can see all the physical stuff your cable firewalls network switches routers the racks to actually put the equipment on power supplies in addition any upgrades and software necessary to make this the internet work now this particular software and upgrades would be specific to things that have to do with running your network so we're not talking like we need new mic new copy of Microsoft Word or anything but things or we need to buy new database to you know provide research help to to our users this is things having to do with running your actual internet network the new thing that they have added to here and this isn't something that's new to the world but it's new to e-rate being eligible for e-rate managed internal broadband services or managed wi-fi this is where you can have a whole separate organization separate company run your internet completely that you don't even do anything the operation management monitoring or anything of it a third party just does everything for you you contract with them and they take care of it on your behalf so something to look into in your areas if there might be someone out there if you're a little wary about keeping up with this yourself or figuring it out this might be something that you want to look into with these kind of organization is out there basic maintenance of internal connections is the other part of category two this is as I said the updating repair if my go to example of squirrel shoes through the wires and in your library that is when somebody's coming to repair this basic updating of your service and your software and anything what you need to think about when you're talking about basic maintenance this is something that you would have a contract ahead of time with someone for now it might be just through your actual service provider that they provide this as a service or there may be some other different company or person in town who does this for you that you pay to come in and you keep things up but before you apply for e-rate for this you do have to have some sort of contract contract or agreement in place saying this is who we we'd be going with and who would be taking care of this for us you may also be paying some sort of fee for this service an extra like monthly fee for them to be on call or just to be as part of it as part of being part of your internet costs that monthly amount just to have it as a service is not what's eligible what is as actual work so you may be paying some sort of fee for three months for them to be available but it's not until that fourth month that you're due for an update of your software or it's not due until that fourth month when the squirrel shoes through your cables when they actually come and do that work that cost that work with that particular job is what you can then get a discount on so this is the kind of thing that you would wait until it happens and then you apply for reimbursement after the fact in addition to all the category one and category two specific services there's all these extra miscellaneous charges all those taxes and fees that you pay on your bill make sure you apply for the discount on those as well it's not just your monthly cost itself it's all those taxes any training that needs to be done would be training for staff who are training related to running your network so if you have some sort of a tech person you need to send off to network training or it takes a class of some sort on how to how to set up and and run a internet network or your library network that training would be eligible for discount in addition there's a new thing that got added with the modernization installation of equipment not all your equipment necessarily nowadays just comes from your your official service provider comes in and does it lots of people myself included personally go to amazon or best buy or somewhere online to purchase the actual equipment the routers and servers and then you need to have so you may need to have pay someone to come in and install it you can now get that installation paid discounted as well so you buy the piece of equipment you get a discount on that equipment then when someone comes and installs it and they charge you for that installation you can then apply to get a discount on that installation charge as well so that is the basics of what's available to you as services for category one and category two any questions before we go on to what the heck our category two budgets you think you want to know more about if it is or isn't eligible all right next up we're going to talk about category two budgets as I said earlier how you get your discount for category one versus category two is different category one it's a basic your cost is this we're going to put a take a certain percent percentage off of it for category two what they've done is they are creating what they call their five-year budget based on the calculation I'm going to show you next libraries are given a certain chunk of money that you can use towards any of those category two services and you can use them over a five-year period it's not just for the next single year of e-rate it's for anywhere from when you start applying to this up to five years out that you can use on all of those now you don't have to keep your cost for category two services and products below this amount of budget it's just you will only be given a discount up to this amount so you may pay ten thousand dollars for some sort of installation and equipment for a new updating computer lab and your category two budget is only five thousand e-rate will help with that five thousand but the extra five thousand above is on you so you're welcome to go and do whatever you want just you'll just realize that you're only beginning a discount up to whatever this budget calculates up to so how much is your discount for libraries it's based on the size of your library building so the space within the walls multiple floors whatever two dollars and thirty cents per square foot so if you have this information somewhere officially saying how many square feet the library is through the city in blueprints whatever look for that make do the calculation and you'll know what your budget is however they do know that there's a lot of small libraries out there and they don't want to be having budgets of like you know five hundred dollars so there is a minimum that if your library is less than four thousand square feet you get that you get a four thousand square feet calculation right off the bat nobody gets less than that so that would be nine thousand two hundred dollars and that's nine thousand two hundred to spend over five years time so don't think oh gosh I've got to think of some big project for next year no you have things you can think of that are going to be doing over the next five years that you can divvy up this money to spend over that time for larger areas population of two hundred fifty thousand or more the cost per square foot is five dollars because things cost more in more urban areas so how do you figure this out your library is thirty five hundred square feet multiply that by two dollars and thirty cents you get eight thousand fifty dollars however you do have that minimum so you actually have nine thousand two hundred and this is the pre-discount budget this is before you've calculated in that discount calculation that we did with the school lunch numbers so your budget is ninety two hundred but in this example you have a this particular library has a fifty percent discount rate so the library will actually receive four thousand six hundred dollars in e-rate funds to spend on category two services over the next five years so you figure out what your budget is then you calculate you combine that with your discount and that's how much you are actually going to be given and not given as here's a check for four thousand six hundred dollars it's we're going to track this amount of money in the e-rate system and as you use it deduct from it until you've used up all of that spending it towards category two related services and equipment now you can use this however you want to however you need you could you could yellow I said you don't have to you could come up with some big project next year you know we're building a new building we want to put all of it towards that or we're upgrading a lab put it all towards that or you could split it up throughout the five years say let's divide it by five and each year we're going to look for things to spend it on or any whatever works for you all it is is it does start on the first year you apply for category two and then it's a available to you for the five years after you could skip a year if you wanted to if you do something first year in 2017 and then you don't have anything to do in 2018 and then use some more in 2019 that's fine it's just you've got five years to use it if necessary they do recalculate your budget if your library hopefully doesn't shrink but gets larger if you put on an addition or build a new building that's a different size then you put you tell them the new square footage and that will be used to then recalculate your budget and then they'll adjust it based on what you've already used and what's available so basically what we're talking about here is they give you this amount of money that you can use and then they track it for you within the system you tell them each year what you've used it on what you're going to be using it on and use it up as you can after the five years the idea is that you will then start with a new five-year budget of course we're only in like the second year of doing this so we'll see how that works in practice any questions about your budgets it is a little weird and confusing it is very different but once you get into actually doing it in practice it starts making sense as you're using it in there in this in the e-rate process you have any questions type them in all right all right next thing we have is technology planning there we go many of you have done technology plans over the years you have struggled through doing them guess what you don't have to anymore for e-rate purposes technology plans are no longer required it's still a good idea to have one of course I will not say don't have one at all but e-rate no longer ask for technology plan this was only for internet-related things to make sure you knew what you were doing or you had a plan for the future of what you would be doing with with your anything technology-related library it's also a good idea here if you are going towards if you are going towards accreditation in Nebraska you can earn points towards your accreditation by having a technology plan so that's a good thing also these plans can be helpful to you when it comes to figuring out those category two budgets what do we have in our technology plan that are going to be doing over the next five years or three years do we are we planning that you know in two years we replace all of our computers and all the networking things related to that and then another year later are we planning on doing this in our computer lab these plans will help you figure out how you can use apply for and then use those category two services and that budget so still think about having one have one to help you keep things going but as far as e-raids concerned it's no longer required to supply for any purposes on their forms there is still a question that you will some questions you will one certification that asks about it because for previous years it is still required and people may still using that form so you'll still see it mentioned and that's why I still mentioned it to you guys as well that you may still see it pop up around on forms and things but for the future starting in 2015 forward you don't actually need to have one anymore one other thing that you have to think about before you get into e-rate is SIPA SIPA is the Children's Internet Protection Act this is about filtering the computers and the Internet in your library blocking the bad sites for e-rate purposes you do need to become in compliance with SIPA if you're applying for anything Internet related whether it's your monthly bill on the category two or any of that equipment and construction and things that have category two I'm sorry category one monthly bill or category two all of the equipment anything that falls under there this is there are three basic things that SIPA requires and Internet safety policy which you probably already have you should hopefully have some sort of policy about how people can and can't use your computers what they can and can't do on the Internet how to be safe on the Internet second thing technology protection measure that's the filter itself the actual software that you use to block the bad sites and the third thing is at some point had having a public notice or something agenda item meeting agenda that talked about the fact that you were doing this we're thinking of installing these or you had installed them so that it's a public announcement there there is information on the USAC website about SIPA there are specific details on it now I have I'll tell you a little bit about this as I said earlier telephone is being phased out of the e-rate program which is going to leave only Internet related services and equipment and products available for e-rate which means in order to be to use e-rate you're going to have to be compliance with SIPA because everything's going to be Internet related by the time the phone is phased out phone was what you did not have to can be in compliance with so to continue or start doing e-rate you do need to think about this and if you are in compliance SIPA as in the filtering part of it is can be controversial in some areas libraries go from there's varying opinions on if it should be done if it shouldn't be done if it's good or bad varying opinions going from of course we need filters we need to block everything that's bad protect the children at all costs up to the extreme other end as filtering is censorship and that is blocking access and freedom to information libraries all about freedom to information don't even talk to me about blocking or filtering don't want to hear it and every variation in between for e-rate purposes however the whole purpose of this presentation and my job here is to get you on board with applying for and receiving e-rate funds SIPA is actually not nearly as I don't know if a hardship is the right word a thing to deal with at least to comply with it enough to get your e-rate discount what's great about SIPA is it's short it's short and it's big it's only depending on how you printed out which version of it's 12, 14 pages long the entire act not much to it and it's not very specific it does not say you must block Facebook and YouTube and this website and that website it says you must block visual depictions of things that are harmful to minors and it's specific to minors of course they consider minors 17 and under it also says physical are the visual depictions obviously it was created to stop the porn from coming into your library and the children seeing the pornography got it okay good thing however there is no software at the moment unless anyone can tell me different if you know something that'd be kind of awesome because we need that in order to make this work there is no real software right now that can successfully tell a visual depiction of something and block it as being the bad stuff needs to not get through due to SIPA nothing if there's a woman standing there in a tan colored dress there's no no software that can look at that and differentiate between the fact that she's wearing a tan colored dress or actually she's naked and it's actual flesh that we're seeing when it's the same shade just didn't work hopefully someday maybe we'll have that but we don't right now so what we do is we kind of fake it we do the best we can with what we do have which we do have filters that will block certain websites that we know are bad certain IP addresses domains that we know are bad there are white lists for good sites black lists for all the bad ones out there and that's what this software can do for you what's great about SIPA too it requires that you look at these things and decide what is best for your community as well what is your level of need in filtering for e-rate and SIPA all you have to do is have this technology protection measure this filter whatever it is and have it installed in the computers there is also an extra item in SIPA that states you must be able to turn it off for anyone adult who requests you to for bona fide research meaning some student doing some college student doing research on breast cancer awareness that's the kind of thing that some of these these filters incorrectly will block they'll see the word breast and say that's bad block that site the American Cancer Society website for breast cancer is not a bad site and you have to go in and turn that off so when it comes to the censorship issue and the this is blocking access to all kinds of information SIPA actually did take that into consideration when it was written it was you know they thought about that and said well there will be times when you'll need to turn it off and let something through that got accidentally blocked so it does have that out there for anyone who's concerned about we're going to be blocking people's information and that's horrible you can just turn it off for anything you want to you can also set the level of it very very low so that it will block only this the least amount of sites that's a good thing as well sometimes people never even come upon a site that it's chosen to block and they'll never even know that you're doing it but just by having that software installed and having turned it on at some level you get your 60, 70, 80 percent discount on all your internet related services it's a really good argument to when you see that you can save that much money to look into this if it is something you have not looked into before so if you're not doing internet already for e-rate I would encourage checking into this seeing what you can do there are one thing also CIPID does not tell you it does not tell you what service what technology protection measure you need to have which software program you have to use there's all sorts of different ones there's ones that are installed individually on each work station there's one that can be just on your server your service provider may may provide that service for you as part of your internet service and then they block it and handle all of it for you all those options are available I do have links on my e-rate website with information about filters things that are available so you can go and investigate which ones are yours there's some that are free there's some that costs a little something it's all over the all over the board out there so as I said going into the future in order to use e-rate you're going to have to be in compliance because everything's going to be internet related but there are ways to just do do to comply that will not impose on what your life your staff is doing what you're like what your users are doing well oh one other thing to be aware of and this is one thing also where people get a little confused about SIPA does not specify that you only put these filters on the children's computers this is something that a lot of people think well the purpose of it is to block the minors from having access we only have to and have filtering on the computers that are in the children's room unfortunately that's one of the bad parts about SIPA it does not say that it says it needs to be on all of the library's computers end of sentence there is no only the ones that the kids might use it's anything which includes yes your staff computers in the back room where your cataloging people are doing cataloging the books however it does have that stipulation that you need to turn it off for when people need to do bona fide work so to comply with SIPA you install it across the board and then turn it off onto the computers that you don't actually need on the staff computers but then the adult computers will be at a lower level than your children's computers but you do have to have it in some way installed everywhere in case USAC ever comes to check up and see what you're doing any questions about SIPA and filtering and anything like that just checking my time here any questions about anything else that I've mentioned the what's available what the what you can or can't get a discount on how your money is calculated how you get your money are you out there wave say hi we're about halfway through we're at about two thirty here as I said we are well go two and a half hours we'll see if we need to do hi so we did say hi cool you're all out there good all right so next we're going to get into the actual forms themselves so next we're going to talk about the actual e-rate forms that you submit throughout the year to apply for e-rate and continue in the program there are four basic types of forms that you submit there's actually six forms in the process and in the whole process but you don't necessarily do all of them everybody does have to do the first three forms to get to to participate in the program that's that's a cut and dry thing there's no getting out of those there's a little bit of wiggle room on the 470 and I'll talk to you about that in a second but gotta do one two three that's your basic process four and this extra new form I'm going to talk about it depends and I explain how it depends and we're going to go into the specifics of each one of these forms too form 470 saying you're looking for e-rate support 471 reporting on who you who your provider is what the services 486 services have started I'd like to you know get my money and then the 472 474s are about how you tell them you want your money to get to receive your discount there's a new form 498 this is a new thing they're doing starting this year where you get your discounts now as a direct if you do reimbursements after the fact and I'll get into the details of that a new form for you to provide the USAC with your bank information to do these direct deposits so this is a timeline of all the different forms also this is more detail on the website but this is just to give you an outline basically of what time of year when things are done you generally start this process in the fall October November where we are right now in the spring sometime is when you do your second form later on in the spring sometimes into the not even until the summer you do the third form and then later fall is when you're working on figuring out you are a final forms in the process we do have people always ask me what is the deadline to start the process what is the deadline for the first form the second form the way the deadlines run is interesting it's a little different than what you it's not just a straight out deadline form 470 is the first form of the process you can apply for that you can submit that right now and I've got slides I'm going to go through showing you exactly how to do that the second form of the process is the 471 471 is only available during a certain time of year for about 75 days or so and they call that the filing window is only a certain time of year you can do that the window for the upcoming year it varies every year when that when those dates are they as of the last time I looked just earlier this afternoon they have not announced yet what the actual filing window is for the upcoming year yet but the FCC did dictate to USAC don't have it open before February 2nd so we do know that much won't be any earlier than February 2nd we just don't know the exact dates yet when you do your 470 saying I'm looking for e-rate and I want to get a service it has to be out there 28 days before you tell USAC who you picked you give service providers 20 days to contact you and say yep I'm up for doing e-rate for you and providing the service whether it's your current one or a new one in order to figure out what your 470 deadline is you look at the close of the window for the 471 whatever the end date will be which we don't know yet and you count back 28 days that's your deadline for the 470 the first form so that's the very latest you could possibly submit your 470 is 28 days before the last day you could submit your 471 giving you that 28 day break there I wish I had the actual dates to give you because that would make this a lot easier but as I said they haven't announced them yet keep your eyes open for that when they do announce it USAC will announce it I'll post it on our website and our mailing list and everything so this is just a basic timeline and I'm going to get into more details about this in all the future slides so in addition to submitting all these forms you also must keep copies of them for 10 years after the last date of service last date of service is the end of the funding year end of every funding year is June 30th of whatever year it is for the year we're coming up to applying for now 2017 that makes it June 30th of 2028 anything that you any forms you submit any contact you have with service providers any back and forth with USAC about your application all of that stuff you have to keep for those 10 years now you do not have to have reams and reams of paper and file cabinets full of them or binders full of things all this can be kept electronically if you want to so anything you get that's paper scan it save it to a flash drive somewhere save it into a file somewhere on your servers wherever in a folder somewhere just keep it available so if you ever do get asked by e-raid they can come to you anywhere from 10 years back and ask for I want to double check on what you did in 2016 for your application and they'll be able to do that up until 2028 they e-raid will does what they call audits of applications this is not the same thing as an audit that that the IRS does as in oh my gosh you did something wrong and we're coming to check on what you did they do more of a checks and balances type thing they do still do those kind of checks to see you know did somebody you know something looks a little wonky with this particular request but they do a checks and balances things basically making sure the program is working correctly is it useful to libraries is it as it easy for libraries to apply to do these forms with any problems they had so they do random checks and they get 50 to 60,000 applications a year so they will randomly check some from those applications to do an audit of and then want to check it up on a particular application year that you did and just see how did the process work did you get all the forms in on time was there a reason was there a problem with our process that we can improve so that's why they may come to you for this information at any point and you do just need to keep everything they had to do with that year for 10 years so that and if they need to they can track how it all worked and here's a list of the kinds of things you would keep the actual forms themselves any correspondence from USAC which right nowadays is all emails so keep those somewhere copies of contracts and agreements and receipts that you get from your service providers when you buy equipment all of these kind of things the forms themselves and the correspondence with USAC is now being kept in their new e-rape portal that we're going to look at next so that's actually a good thing excuse me the new online system they've said we will keep everything in there for 10 years that's a done thing we are keeping it all electronically for you however if you're a little skeptical of that or you prefer a little more of your own control and this is what I've done you can download PDF versions and copies of this all yourself so you have your own backup copies just in case up to you if you think that's necessary so that's the basic forms in the process and now we're going to go into actually the portal itself and specifics of each of the forms so the new e-rape portal is called EPIC EPC is the acronym and that stands for the e-rate productivity center they have said that it's pronounced EPIC for its acronym starting in last year's funding year 2016 most of the forms are filed within it the idea was all of them would be however one a couple of forms didn't get programmed into there yet they just ran out of time so it's almost all the forms are in there there is a direct website you can use to go to it portal.usac.org also you can get to it from the e-rate website and I'm going to show you where that is as well so why did they do this? well ultimately the FCC told them to but the reasoning was to consolidate things to streamline things and make it easier for everyone both libraries applying service providers trying to deal with the libraries in USAC and USAC themselves to track everything all stuff now everything you do is now in one location you've got one account that's your library's profile where everything related to all the different forms you do is on one place one place you log into to access everything previously if anyone has done the e-rate in the last few years there has the forms have been online but each one was a separate place to go to a separate login for each form and they were not at all connected to each other in any way in this new portal everything is all there together everything is all connected to each other all the forms that you do for over the year any questions that USAC has for you is all done through the portal as well so anytime they question you on something want no more information or you question them it's all kept and saved in there for you so having one place to go to is much easier than having to figure out all these different places also the access itself has been this is one of the really good things about it from any device that you want to you can use it on your PC on your tablet laptop any computer you have you could even use your own smartphone if you wanted to I wouldn't recommend submitting a form out of here on this tiny little screen but or filling in any of that information but checking up on the status of something that is something you potentially do on a smaller screen also you can use any browser of your choice previously if anyone remembers the online forms had to be done using internet export if they just did not have the programming power or programming time to have their their government programmers create the forms that they would work both in explorer and firefox and chrome safari whatever you use you could and people did do this submit forms using other browsers and I did have some libraries do this use firefox it didn't actually go through however you think you'd submitted something you never got a certification never got a notification because it actually didn't really work behind the scenes it only worked with IE now you can use any browser there is no longer restriction that is huge if you ask me use your firefox chrome safari whatever you want to go in it's all going to work no problem so it's much more easy to get to it to use it anywhere you feel comfortable when when you set first set this up they have automatically created an account for every library so every organization who has ever done e-rate before with USAC was created an account was created for you in there whether you're a school library system whatever they created one they also identified at that time a particular person at that institution to be their account administrator to start with they looked at the 2015 applications so two years before the year right before they were started doing it which was for 2016 and whoever was listed as the contact person on the 2015 form 471 that person was designated as account administrator and they were sent an email saying hey you've been set up with this account go in there and start figuring out using it now this was done before people needed to start applying for the form so there's a little bit of confusion out there by now though anybody who's been using it should be acclimated and have some sort of an account but I'm going to go into the details about how all this all works now except for one particular form that I'll get to you no longer need that pin number that you had or use that would assign you a code number to certify and sign off on all the forms and usually you couldn't remember it because it was a mishmash a generate automatically generated mishmash letters and numbers and symbols now you create your own account you pick your own password for whatever you want it to be and maintain it yourself account administrators you can also have multiple people have access to your library's account as well so if you have a separate person and an assistant director or a tech person who you want to be in charge of this you as the account administrator if you are the one set up originally can create a user account for that person and give them access to it there are different levels of access you can give people as well so if you have certain people you don't want to be able to do everything you can give them view only or partial access partial permissions and then only you or someone else can have the actual be able to actually submit your forms so you can decide as as necessary who gets what kind of level access now to actually get to usac there's a couple of different ways to do it first thing on usax on website usac.org slash s l that's s l for schools and libraries upper right they've put up put in a button that is EPC the epic button will jump you right to the login screen alternately previously they had over here on the left says apply for erate if you click there it brings you to a screen that's about to the epic system and then they're over to the right is where you can log in now if you are brand new to erate you are not doing it in 2015 you don't know what happened to the or you just don't know where the email is for whoever was sent to to start up a new account a startup doing erate you can contact usac they've got their 800 number here you contact their customer service department and they will be able to set you up with an account so that you can get in and use your libraries erate account and start working on your forms or continue with the previous forms this happens a lot a library directors left and did not pass on to the next person the access to the system didn't give them a user account or if you're just brand new wanting to try erate or your library hadn't done it for five or six years and you finally want to pick up on it you may need to contact them to get yourself set up and being able to use it now when you're first when you first set this up they sent the account administrator an email unlike and then they had sent them where they could go to log in and where they could use the forgot password option to reset and make up their own password when you first go into the erate system to log in you first get this pop-up box when you click on that um that little blue bot button here or up here right off the bat it makes you agree to the basic terms your your access and use sex system you have to say I agree the green green button and then it will ask for your username and password your username is your email address easy whatever email address you use to do all of your work with um use that that will always be your email your user name password you select yourself now unlike many many other systems if you've ever applied for accounts in anything on any online systems there is not a create an account for me or set up an account for myself this is because from behind the scenes already use that has created the library's account and potentially your administrator account and they don't want you going in creating a whole brand new one so instead of that what you do is you reset your password you pretend you forgot what your password is and you create a new one the very first time to go in so when you hit reset your password it will say okay give me your username your username being your email address and you request to password reset it sends you an email that says click on this link to go and make up your new password very similar to any other time you've done this as it says there you got 15 minutes use that link that's how long it's valid for type in your username again once you use that link and then create whatever you want your new password to be following these rules as with many sites they do have rules on how what needs to be in your password eight characters long it has to have a letter a number a special character non alphabet or number one uppercase letter and at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter so you've got to figure out some mishmash of all this stuff for yourself in addition it says it has not been used in the previous four passwords this new system this new company that you set got with contracted with to create this system has some security rules where they may they do make you change your password every 60 days yeah that is annoying when usex was told that that was the how it worked they said that's going to be a hardship we can't with these libraries come in every few months to do a form every time they come in it's spread out over the year they're going to have to do a new password that's really you know that's a problem and the company just said well there's just no way of getting around it it's just how it works behind the scenes fine so we just have to work with that you'll note you'll note that sometimes you go you'll note that sometimes you go to log in it will say your password is has expired or is expiring or is invalid and you need to just go ahead and reset it and make up a whole new one easiest way to do this set up a pattern of you know certain numbers letters special characters and then just change the number each time like whatever it would be and put number one at the end and then when they tell you changed again everything else can say the same and just change it to number two next time they tell you to change it everything else can say the same and just change it to number three on down the line until they let you reuse it it says here has not been used in the previous four passwords I'm on like I have one two three four five six and I haven't been able to reuse one yet so I'm not sure exactly how accurate that is but eventually you'll be able to just rotate back to your first one that's that's what they've been told so that is just something to keep in mind when you're doing your passwords and using the system it will ask you regularly to reset it you just make up a new one and it's all up to you what you want it to be once you have your password set you go back and login again using your same username and whatever password you just created they do have a remember me on this computer button box here which is something brand new just I just noticed it in last month or so I haven't checked on mine I haven't noticed that it's actually remembering my info so maybe one of those features coming most likely what it'll do is remember your username and all you'll have to enter is your password so once you do have your password set then you go ahead and sign in the very first time you log in you will have to agree to their terms and conditions within the system it automatically dumps you to that you click on it to complete the terms and conditions and this is I've got two screens here because it's so long you know the long all the rules and regulations about using it and you just choose accept at that point it will pop you to your landing page now this is a very obviously a very small text here that you're seeing on the screen this is a full view of the whole landing page and I'm going to zoom into different sections of it of it to show you and talk about the different areas but this is just so you see what there is your landing page is your home page for Epic it's where you're always going to start when you first log in it's where you go back to whenever you need to do something throughout the whole system you'll always have this universal service administrative of company and logo here that you can use to go to come back to your landing page this all those blue box things there that's our new logo they just did that also last month they updated their website and came up with a new logo so you'll see some of my screenshots have an older logo because of when I took them but anywhere in the system you are click on that it'll pop you back to your landing page again across the top of your interface is some menu items and I'm going to go into what they are all first one is news this is basically your inbox this is where USAC will contact you they will tell you we are have some questions we've here's your notification letter for something in this case it's just showing a screen show that they're weekly news briefs so this is where you will have all that information there is consider news like an email inbox for you a second option is tasks tasks is anything that you're in the middle of working on the wording for these tasks is confusing I think it's it could use some fixing as you can see here in my examples many of them say create form whatever what it really means is once something is in your tasks to create these forms that means you are actually in the middle of creating one and it's saying don't forget this is here you need to continue working on it and finish it up so it's a little confusing when you see it says create which may make you think and I've had this happen I need to create one no this means you've already created one there it is there click on that link to continue where you left off the system will keep track where you where you were in the process of the form and jump put you back in where you left off next option over is records this is a whole bunch of different things that you can go to for different reasons the company that E-rate went with with this Appian or APN I'm not exactly sure I think Appian would be how it's pronounced they this is not where they they did not go to a company and say hey build something for our E-rate system our E-rate program they said they found a company that has a system that could be used and they've kind of mushed E-rate into it and are using it as best they can for E-rate purposes so many of the things here are just dumped into different areas and they don't necessarily make sense the categories but we just have to kind of remember where they are we're kind of working with something that wasn't built originally for E-rate so we're using it as best as we can so under records we've got where you can have if you do an appeal for your if you don't get what your money is entity information information but all the different forms this is the first half of the screen I've got a second screenshot of the second bottom half knowledge-based center so FAQs information about things list of service providers whistleblower cases as something's going wrong somebody's doing something illegal on the system so this is just a whole mishmash of those things and there'll be various reasons why in your process you'll end up being sent to your record section to look at in those areas next option many way to across the top is reports they don't have much in here yet they're not they're still looking for what reports we might want to have come out from the system right now as you can see it gives you a link to go back to your landing page but this logo to the left would do that as well they didn't just add with this new year my submitted modification requests each time you submit forms in the process the first two forms you can afterwards if you realize you made a mistake you can make a change you can fix it and that's what they call modification requests so that's where you would track those last item across the top is your actions as you can see here the whistle or cases here as well this is where you can contact USAC and you can search for any of your forms your 470s and 471s from here along with from some other places you can do that so that's the free menu items across the top all the way to the right on that blue bar is the link to your particular profile this is the profile for you as the person logging in and using the system there's a little triangle to the right of your name what you would check on click on that and would open up a pull down menu where you can set some settings this is where you also sign out of the system the system does Epic does have a 60 minute timeout so if after 60 minutes of inactivity you don't do anything it will automatically log you out but if you just want to do it yourself that's where you log out there's also where you work on your own personal profile information they do have a section here where you can put in a profile picture if you wanted to like I said the system is built for other purposes is available for other purposes as well I don't know why you would want to do a picture but as you can see I haven't but it's there but what you do to actually edit your your profile and look at your personal one is over on the left related actions it brings up manage epic user profile and then you have where you can change the basic information about you so if your name address or any of that changes phone number all that changes over time you can update that in here if you need to to add other users to the system back to your landing page in the upper right hand point of your landing page they have a lot of these quick links different things as you can see all the different forms you would do and then manage users this is to add or modify some of either your account or someone else's account you've set up or create a new one in this case you check in the box next to your library's name and then create a new user and then just give you that same information blank enter their name what email address they're going to be use and that's going to be their user name for their account what the address is and then below this and you scroll down farther is the user permissions that I was talking about that talked about previously you got full rights partial rights and view on the users so depending on how much access you want you need someone to have and then as you can see for each particular form you can have the permission set at a different level so if for some reason you only have someone who's going to work on the first two but not the other ones however it works along there you can decide who does what the only place that I can see that might in most of our library's situations apply is for the 498 that's the one where you're putting in the banking information so if you have someone who does know that info and that's all they need to do in the system and they don't want to tell you the banking information you know the routing number or account number you could give that person access just to the 498 create a user account for them then your money person your clerk whoever can go in and enter that info for you and then as you can see the 498 permissions are slightly different than the ones for all the regular forms they have your options are school or library official or general financial contact if you are the one who are doing all the information and entering that you would choose school or library official as you can see they can do everything for the 498 a general financial contact can submit things but can't do it make the activator take out any of the banking information so that'd be a little thing you might want to be have some control over so that's about use putting creating user profiles now if you want to work with your library your organization's profile you go to manage organizations from your landing page same thing you check in this case very similar check your library hit manage organization and then this is just information about your library you've got your address latitude latitude longitude is not necessary to be some entered whoops urban or rural status this is where you tell them whether your library is urban or rural for the purpose of calculating your discount this is the next section now this is a long page too so I've got each section of it in a separate side your mailing address if it's the same if you have any other contact information you want to put in for the library then basic library info what kind of library is it public private anything else that applies if it's a bookmobile a main branch and this is the one for the library commission so I select state library agency if you are just an individual library which like 99% of our libraries across Nebraska are you want to make sure you mark yourself as the main branch you're the only branch but you're also the main branch that's how it knows that you are the one that's usually that is applying for this square footage this is where you enter your how many square feet your library is if you ever need to calculate category two funding next section down is your school district if it's not in there automatically by default as you can see here I've already got it selected you'll have a search where you can look up your school district easiest thing to do is just type in whoops type in the zip code of your city where you are and then because you don't have to enter every one of these these are the four different ways you could search type in the zip code do a search it'll bring up any school districts then you select the one that's for your where your library is and then it will know that that's the school district's numbers to use to calculate your discount previously libraries had to look up this information and enter it into the form now the information is actually pulled in from the schools that are using the system so you don't have to now to enter that information anymore it's automatically pulled in because the school district for their own purposes enters their school numbers so that's a little it makes it a little easier for libraries so that's the basics of navigating around the system and working on your user and organization the library profiles any questions I don't know anything about what I've anything that I've mentioned yet any specifics about your libraries do you want to ask me anything about on to the actual forms themselves so first up we have form 470 and I'm going to go through a lot of screenshots of doing the 470 and then for the other forms I don't have screen shots all the way through they're all very similar but this is the one that you're going to be submitting right now so I'm going to give you all the details on this the 470 officially opens a competitive bidding process now that it can be very weird and intimidating to the libraries that why do I need to do this this is just the rules of e-rate how it works when you're actually applying for e-rate you are opening up to any service provider that might want to contact you and saying hey I'm looking for somebody to provide me with this service my monthly internet bill my monthly phone I want to put some wiring or cabling in who can offer this to me so it's like doing a request for proposal or request for quote now that doesn't mean you're going to get a lot of people contacting you a lot of companies and it doesn't mean you have to change if you're just wanting to cruise along with the same providers you've had for your monthly bills that's fine but you are officially doing this you just need to go through the steps for e-rate purposes and I'll open it up to anyone you just put in the basic information in your 470 what service you're looking for what library it's for all the basics and you'll see that on the form is when we get into that because it is a competitive bidding process you do have to officially legally give any providers a chance to just learn you're looking for this and submit their up their quotes to you that's what that 28 days is for you need to have it out there for 28 days before you can officially pick who you're going to go with you may end up just going with your same provider because you're the only one in town I know there's not necessarily five different internet vendors in your town but you do still have to wait to do it as I said earlier the file there is a specific filing window for the 471 the second form we don't know what it is yet but it will not be before February 2nd of next year so now is the time to do your 470 just because that deadline will be coming up to next year you don't need to wait and please do not if you wait until the deadline for the you know wait until January and the last day that's possible you're gonna have issues potentially most likely their servers are gonna get bogged down too many people wait to the last day if there's a snowstorm because this is gonna be in winter still and you can't get to the library to your computer to do it or if your power goes out and you can't log on on the final day you could be out of luck for getting your e-rate for the upcoming year because you couldn't get it in by the deadline so just because there will be eventually announced an official deadline do not wait for that please don't I'm begging you do it now the 470 is out there it's available go ahead and put your info into it and at least get that done checked off your list of things to do next February when the 471 becomes available then you can start working on the second step in the process there is one case when you might not be able to have to do a 470 they're trying to convince server providers to offer really high speed internet at a really good price to schools and libraries if you can find somebody who is offering this particular then you can skip the 470 you just automatically wait until February and report and saying who you're going with so you need to get at least 100 megabits download and 10 megabits upload speeds $300 are less per month and it's something that is publicly commercially available for anyone not just a special deal because you're doing e-rate so I haven't heard of any libraries doing getting to this yet Nebraska but quite a few especially this year talking about they're really close they're getting 90 megabits or they're down our seven love load and they're going to go and talk to the provider and say hey do you can you bump us up a little and then we can skip this whole bidding process this whole competition thing and we just automatically go with it so look into that with your providers ask around see if this is something that's out there and see if you can get on board with at least being able to skip this one part of the process now to do your 470 back on your landing page and that menu there is a link to the FCC form 470 and as soon as you click on that it starts up an application for you this also automatically puts something into your tasks that is the create a form 470 link that you can then keep using to go on and continue if you need it automatically pulls in from your libraries info being your libraries profile the basic info this is something that previously you had to every time you create wrote created a form you had to enter this yourself every time now it automatically just dumps it all in there for you makes it so much quicker and easier that you don't have to type in and all this info we'll make sure it's correct but you do have to give an application nickname this can be anything that you want it's just a nickname for this particular form so that if you have to track it later or they need to contact you that they'll they'll refer to this nickname that you create okay I do have a question that just came in which is actually this is actually a good time for that question Stephanie someone asked what if you were under contract we always got free internet as I mentioned before but had to start paying this year but for the cheapest rate we signed a three-year contract if you're already under contract with someone you're going to have to do a little change for change that up a little bit the e-rate process itself is you do a 470 saying we're looking for someone to provide the service people can't library come you figure out somebody contacts you then we do the 471 that's when you report who you've chosen and that's when you're supposed to sign any new contracts you can't have a previously signed contract then you go in and say I want to get a e-rate discount on that you have to give anyone else the way they think of it you have to give anyone else a chance to contact you and you know compete with whatever someone else has given you that in this contract so the process is 470 wait 28 days sign a contract and do the 471 now if you've already signed a contract to someone I would recommend contacting them and saying hey we want to do e-rate with you now though so we need to change this up we need to stop this contract at the time when we're doing the 470 and we're going to have to sign a new one that comes starts in next February when the 471 is available now the I think you said yeah three-year contract very often doing multi-year contracts that's a good thing because you will get they'll sometimes give you a cheaper deal as you said by locking it in for three years and that's fine for the first time you do this as I said you do your 470 you wait you do 471 sign a new contract if you've already got a contract of the company contact them and say hey can we amend this contract to end next spring sometime so that when the new E-rate year comes up I can re-sign a new contract that starts at the right time along with the 471 and start that three-year process over again most companies who've done E-rate before they know this they'll be willing to negotiate that with you and work that out so that you can both be online with the E-rate lined up with the E-rate funding year now if you had once you do that your first year the next year you do not have to do a 470 for that particular service for that internet because you already did that open bidding and pick the provider the first year for that particular service you wait and skip to the 471 the following year the second year of the contract you don't put it in the 470 again because that will open it up for bidding again and that will you know start the whole process you wait and just go to the 471 when that's available on year two and just report that yes we're still with the same company and then on three or three the same thing skip the 470 and just start the process with the 471 saying yes we're still that same company after that third year then the next one you'd have to start a new 470 to open it up for another three-year contract so does that help did it explain if you already got a contract you might have to do some negotiating with your provider to end it so you can start a new one and then for all those years of that contract you skip the fund the open bidding and just continue with the same one go all right that works thank you all right thanks for the question because that is something that some people need to know about so when you are in your 470 form there's some buttons across the bottom discard form is on the left at any time in the process up until you've submitted it you can always discard the form completely and cancel it if you realize you did something completely wrong or you just want to start over because you're weren't sure about what you're doing you can always discard and cancel out the form you also save and share and save and continue generally you save and continue just to go on to each step in the process in the form and move along until you get to the end and you submit it save and share is only for the case of if you are the person who submits the info in the form but someone else has the authority to sign off on it and you have to share it to them to their user account in Epic and have them do the actual signature and certification and most places for our libraries it's the same person doing everything so that's not necessary so most likely you'll just use save and continue on through the whole form until you submit it so after you get your nickname in there you save and continue the second page second page your 470 is just confirming here's all the info about your library is it all correct if it is you're good to go if you notice something needs changing you've got to go back to your landing page and to manage organizations and update and fix anything otherwise you save and continue to the next screen consultants there are companies out there that you can pay to do your e-rate for you generally that's for large group organizations like multi-branch library systems or school districts that have so many different things and it's such a complex application that they need someone else to take track of it if you don't have anyone this would also be in your organization profile like keep that just to save that info so you can just leave that blank but you do need to tell them the other underneath that that you are the main contact person if you hit yes because it's you it automatically puts in your personal information from your profile and then you save and continue next is when you actually tell what services you're going to be looking for you can do category one service by clicking on the button turning it green or you can do a 470 for category two or you can do one for both your choice in this example I've done one on both so you can see how they both work but you can do however you want you can have multiple 470s out there if you know for example right now that you'd like to do just the monthly phone and internet and you can shoot off that 470 for category one right off the bat fine but you're going to look into category two because you hadn't investigated it yet and you want to see what we might be doing over the next five years look at I want to look a little closer at our technology plan or our strategic plan to see what we're working on and then you can come back and do a second 470 you can have more than one out there that'll just be your category two up to you however you want to have it work out or you wait and do all at the same time so you check whichever ones you want they turn green you save and continue it will then ask you if you have a separate RFP a separate request for proposal a separate request for quote for large projects like a new library building or a whole new computer lab you probably have something a lot more in depth than what a 470 tells people about what you want to do about what the project's going to project's going to entail about what serve what actual equipment you need and you can upload that document into the epic system so that any service providers that might come along and want to investigate applying you know submitting a quote to you can see that information this is where you can do that if you don't have anything big like that you would choose no instead and then just go on to the next step now okay and then this is where you put in the actual services this is also a big you know hard to read on the screen I'm sure but I'm going to go into the details of these sections just when you see the whole page you have a section for service requests for category one and for category two this is because I selected both of those and my previous screen when I had the choice if you'd only choose one or the other you'd only have those available to you at this service request point you can also see here now at the top this does have a bar that goes across the top tracking where what step you are at in the process so you can see where you are along going along so we're going to zoom in to our category one and whenever you're applying for e-rate you're requesting services whether it's an actual service as what we think of as in your monthly bill or it's the equipment you're buying of the installation whatever they call it a service request so to start a new one you click that green button add new service request and then for category one it will have a pull down menu it'll show you that I have all the different choices of what you can do under category one this is all your the basic ways of doing having your internet your dark fibers here your lit fiber your internet access is here voice service is the last choice for as long as that's around so you choose whichever one you're doing you're asking for in this case I think I did yep ISP service so your basic monthly internet for this particular one and depending on which service you choose it's going to ask relevant questions for that service in this case it's asked for your minimum and maximum speed capacity how fast what's your minimum you want and what's your maximum you're looking for your 470 is kind of is think of that as dreaming what is the best I could get now I might not be available but it doesn't hurt to ask it's not till your 471 the second form that you tell them what you actually ended up with so you can think big here as far as your maximum capacity I only put 50 but you can put down 100 150 I think they even have gigabit choices there I know that some town some cities are getting that put that down make sure though that it will at least encompass what you can get not that it's too low if you say we only want 25 but there's a provider that offers 50 in your town and comes to you or your provider says we'll give you 50 megabits per second and you only put 25 as your maximum on your 470 you'll only get an e-rate discount up to the 25 megabit per second cost so think big here the 470 is where you get for 71 is where you get specific number of entities you're just one library you put one and this is that special construction do you need installation and instruction and maintenance for this if it's just continuing with your regular monthly you know costs you'd say no if it is something new then you would say yes to get that on the application and then it's added to your list of category one requests table comes up the all basic info also there's a narrative down here where you can type in any extra information you might need if this doesn't if you think this doesn't give enough info and you don't have that full on rfp that you uploaded here is just a free text box where you can get specific I just wrote monthly internet access for public library we're going to add a second one now we'll click the green button again add new service request and now we're going to do the voice one voice service is just only there's only one choice for that because it's all grouped together it's the last choice on the pull down menu once you choose that you click the add button to the right and this asks you different questions quantity for voice means a number of phone lines do you have a phone line and a fax line in 809 however many you have coming in to the library number of entities you're still one library and whether or not you need that construction again and now you'll see once you click the add button here you'll see it's now added to your list of services same thing we can add now more to that narrative in this case because you'll notice there's not a lot of detail in the phone description when you use the pull down menus this is where you'd specify it's for local and long distance telephone service for my library if it was for a fax line or something else this is where you would detail that because there's nowhere else built into the form to tell them what you're looking for so that's all we're going to put in for our Craig Ray one scroll down a bit there is an installment payment plan question this is something new they added they know that sometimes some of these services for the installation can cost a lot and if there are companies that are willing to put you on a payment plan for that as the library e-rate will work with that as well as far as giving you your discount so you can say if that's something going to be doing or not we're also now going to add our category two request click add new service request under category two and this gives you different choices because it's related to the category two services your internal connections your basic maintenance of those and then that managed internal broadband services that managed Wi-Fi I'm just going to one example here you get a different pull down menu for your internal connections all the different equipment that you can get a discount on and I chose cabling needs wiring in this case it tells you the unit we're looking for is how many feet do you need depending on what service you ask for it's going to give you ask you different questions you can choose a manufacturer if you have a preference you don't have to it always says the manufacturer or equivalent as well so if they don't can't find the exact company you want you know brand you want you can and then are you also in this case we need an installation in this case I want some cabling and yes I would like somebody to come and install it for me you add that one and it comes up on your list now of your category two if I needed to explain a little more about it I could whoops go back I could in this narrative box underneath category two explain a little more about where the cable is going why it's going in anything like that now at this point if I have more equipment that I want to do for category two I would go in and add another new service request I'm going to go back to that pull down menu here for each one of these pieces of equipment everything here on the list that you have you're going to need to do a new service request for each one if you're going to be buying some racks and routers and switches you're going to be doing three different service requests so do this whole thing that I just went through for the cables three more times so this is going to be a repetitive thing for each thing you want to get everything here on this pull down menu is going to if you want to choose something new it becomes a whole new request that you go through the process of putting in there and then you end up with a long list of all the different things that you wanted there's not just a one shot thing and then right along description of everything you have to pick it from here each time so depending on what you're doing you're going to be adding all of those and ending up on here with a much longer list of a whole bunch of equipments for demo purposes I just did the one and now here's what you would end up with your category one services the the basic phone and internet bills and then here all my equipments would be listed down here once I've got all of them on there then I save and continue on to the next paid screen in the form rather than clues choosing the green using the green button to add another service request to this list and adding to it so it depends on if you need to add more save and continue you have do you have a technical contact person is there someone else you prefer a service provider to contact if they have questions about this service or about the installation or about the construction if there is you can enter it if not you don't have to it's just you for yes you can either create an account for them in Epic which generally isn't necessary because it's your techie person might not need to get into e-rate stuff but you can also enter their details yourself just manually name, phone number and email address the next question will ask you if there are any state or local procurement requirements this is any rules that the state or your local city or county has about how you can ask for services do you have to go through a certain process when you're doing an RFP or something for major contracts there might be major construction there might be for the state itself at the state level we don't have any rules you guys can do whatever you want but you might want to look into when you're doing something more than just my basic monthly and some pieces of equipment for more construction projects there might be some sort of rules and if there is you'd upload them to here once you know that the last now you're done with all the basic parts of the form you can review your FCC form for 70 now when you hit that button it starts working on generating a PDF this here which is a static screenshot this is one of those little circular snake things that goes round and around and around as it's working on it so it's going to keep working on generating it what you have to do is keep hitting the refresh button this green button here to see if it's done yet it won't automatically show it to you when it is done you have to keep asking I had to learn that the hard way by staring at screen for about five minutes and wondering why it wasn't working so wait 10, 20 seconds hit refresh if it's just pops back to this page wait another 10, 20 seconds hit it again for me it usually took two or three tries and then I finally would get it once it is ready it will then give you this screen where it has a link to actually look at the PDF version of your 470 you'll notice here there is also the button the green button to continue to certify but it's not live yet it's grayed out you have to check this box to certify that the PDF is correct before it will let you certify so it kind of gives you a little check of make sure you did everything correctly you click on this hot link here and it will bring up the PDF and this is a long PDF it's just a copy of what you had entered into the form basic library info your particular service requests tech contact any other information you had in there at this point from this PDF if you wanted to you could save it to your own computer so you have your own copy of it printed out whatever you want to at this point it's also saved electronically in the system itself but if you want to back up this is when you would do that once you're sure everything's correct you check the box saying it's correct and now it will let you continue to certification and it says are you sure it wants to make sure you're done are you sure sure you're done are you really sure you say yes if you are and then this is where you check all those boxes you've seen this before in e-rate forms I do have a zoom into the certifications this is just agreeing to all the rules of the rate the legality of I certify that I'm the right person to do this that we're going to use it for in the library educational purposes it'll all be done in the up and up with open bidding all that stuff so you have to check every single one of the boxes and then in the lower right then check the certify button if you don't check all the boxes it won't let you certify anyway so it'll come pop up with an error saying hey you missed one so you really can't get past this without checking them all it will then come up with the scary fault statements on this forming result in civil liability or criminal prosecution this is a legal form you're submitting so it does you know give you that warning that are you you know this is something you're doing are you sure you of course got to say yes to submit it and then you pop back your landing page now if you go to the bottom under FCC forms this is where you can look up any of the forms you've previously submitted you'll be able to choose actually 470, 471 and 486 in this case I'm just showing you how to look at the one we just did and whether they are actually been done or you're still working on them it'll bring up all of them this case I've got once I certified that I'd done and one that I'm still in the process of and it's incomplete the nickname over here is a blue hot link you can click on and then it is now here is the online version of the form with all the information in there same thing as that PDF just online you can print this if you want to do do a screenshot of this one in addition it sends you a notification letter receipt notification letter which used to come in the mail if anyone remembers you used to get these colored pieces of paper pink blue yellow that you'd actually physically come to you in the mail they're not doing that anymore it's all coming online in the system this is in your news section it is will be the most recent thing in the news and it says your form has been certified and received and it tells you here the allowable contract date allowable contract date is the 28 days after the form was submitted that's when you know you're able to do your 471 in addition to being window of course you have to wait for the window to be open but it tells you right here now you've got to wait till in this case when I did this one it was I had to wait till April 26 of 2016 so you'll see that date and you'll you'll know that's as long as I have to wait basically you do this and then you sit back and wait those 28 days don't do anything for that time so that letter it summarized the information you can use that letter to make any corrections if you just realize after the fact that oh wait I did do something wrong you can always go back and fix it and I told you it gives you your date when that allowable contract date when those 28 days are up they will actually send you an email telling you the date has passed been reached you can now do your 471 pretty awesome so they will give you a reminder letting you know when that time is up now you do have to wait for the window to open but this is pretty cool I thought what they they proactively nudge you and say hey it's time to do the 471 if you can it also ends up that notification about the allowable contract date into your news items as well that hey so everything they they notify you with ends up in multiple places after that date has passed and the 28 days has passed and it is the window has opened this is when you do that evaluating and choosing who you're going to go with if you get multiple contacts multiple companies that contact you there's a chance you won't get any and that'd be awesome you just cruise along with your current provider but if you do get anybody that contacts you you do have to do some sort of evaluation for e-rate purposes so they know why you chose this the who you chose look at if you do get contacted from anybody look at what they send you make sure it's for the services you asked for and make sure they actually offer service in your city in our state we have got companies out there that are just doing a phishing expedition and just looking for anybody who might want e-rate services and I've had many libraries I just said one a couple weeks ago say someone from because Alabama contacted me a company and I contacted them back because they had a good deal and when I told them where I was they were very confused that I was I mean why you're in Nebraska but we're in Alabama it's like you reached out to me they're just not paying attention so pay attention if they're not offering services in their area and they're offer and they say hey we have something that you didn't ask for you don't have to even look at their bids or look at or you know take them in consideration I've actually here at the library commission that we apply for I get emails all the time from companies wanting to offer a cell phone service cell phone service wasn't on our 470 so I can just delete those and ignore them so just keep that in mind pay attention what it is however if it is something that is a valid service and you you know that and they do offer service in your area they do have to do some sort of an evaluation this is just so that if e-rate or any other companies question it you will be able to tell them why you picked who you picked why did I stick with my same company even though some new company came in and gave me a better deal cost has to be it's a cost effectiveness is what they're looking for and cost has to be the primary factor the thing you look at most importantly but not the only thing and this chart that e-rate has put together I think is a really good example of how you can do this kind of a comparison think of all the things that are important to you in picking your service provider assign points values to them cost has to have the price of the service has to be the most the highest point value but then everything else and it all adds up to 100 then when you if you get contacted by multiple vendors and it's a service you're actually looking for and they check with them and they actually will provide you service in your town you then look at it and assign points you'll see here what we have is two vendors one and three who we know we have pretty good pricing a new vendor came into town we don't know them at all prior experience with vendor is zero but they had a really cheap they had the cheapest price so they got the full 30 points for their price however when everything else was taken into consideration vendor three got the most total points and that's who you would go with probably that's your your local guy that you've the local company you've always been with you don't know these guys you don't know if they're any good and this is perfectly a valid reason to pick them and if you ever get asked this does not have to be submitted with your forms but this is good to have just in case you're ever asked after the fact vendor two says hey we are cheaper than this vendor three in town you should have gone with us we're going to complain this here if you have this little chart somewhere or even a memo to yourself saying this is the reason then it is this kind of reasoning that is what you can show to them and to e-rate if they decide to ask you this is why we have no experience with them and our other vendor we have more experience with them and that's why we went with them it didn't matter that they were just the cheapest another category you could put in here is again I need to add that knowledge of customer service if you know that a company really is bad at customer service and it's the other one that I've been with is good that would be something else that could be a good reason we've heard about them and our experience from other people says they're terrible at customer service we didn't want to go with them our current company was better that would be a reason so just keep that in mind if you ever get any multiple contacts from companies if you're lucky you won't have to worry about this at all all right any questions we got about a half hour left and I will be able to get through everything that we have left here in that amount of time not a problem any questions you have about that first 470 that's the first form in the process that's where you get started the form is available right now go out maybe not today because it's getting late in the day tomorrow when you get into work do your 470 there's no reason to wait to the deadline just get it out there if you're ready to put down what you're looking for if you want to investigate your category two stuff a little more that's fine do a 470 for your basic services and then go investigate your four category two things and do something later this month sometime in January however works out best for you any other questions any questions yet right now about the first form the 470 before we get into some of the details of the other ones all right on to the rest of the forms there all right so the second form of the process is your form 471 now from this point forward I do not have screenshots of every single screen like I did in the 470 that would have made this this workshop another hour and a half longer and nobody wants that also these forms form is not even going to be available to next February and there is still chance certain things might change on the form and I didn't want to give you guys screenshots of something that might end up looking completely differently there will be information on the USAC website of screenshots if anything does get majorly updated but I'm going to give you a few things and at least information about these forms that you will be doing next year the 471 is the form that you do after your 28 days has passed from your 470 and the window has opened this is when you tell USAC who you picked for your provider and what the service is actually going to be this is also when your discount calculation is pulled in to show how much money you're going to get how much discount you're going to get 471 comes from the same place upper right hand part of the screen here or you click on the 471 and it starts off this is the first screen very similar to the 47470 basic information give it a nickname and go on and start entering in all the basics of what you're ending up with you can see across the top here it has where it will attract as you're going through the form as I said you wait till the 28 days your level contract date has been reached and you sign a contract if necessary if you have an ongoing contract you don't have to sign a new one every year no and the window has opened as I said we don't know when but it won't be before February 2nd there is an FCC registration number that's now part of this form that they asked for it's actually in your profile of your organization profile if it's not automatically in there from you previously doing it you can look it up on the FCC website it's just a number that everybody's been assigned this ever as they say does business with them if you don't have one you can request one easy they send it to you quickly in the email but that is something new that libraries have not had to do in the past when you're doing your 471 each service that you have asked for whether it's your monthly internet your monthly phone bill your different equipment your installation is assigned a funding request number this is a number that you sec may use to contact you and ask you for more information about the provider itself also has a spin number assigned to them they might have more than one so this is just a tip make sure you're using the correct one with them if you've been using the same provider for years you're just using the same one you should be good but if it's somebody new double check to make sure you're using the right ID number for them sometimes they like they've had have set up multiple numbers for different services that they provide but your service provider will be able to get you that just like the 470 after you submit the form you'll get a letter put into your news that summarizes what you did you can also use that to shoe make any corrections if necessary that ends up just like the 470 in your news you're going to notice a lot of repetition in these forms go through the form submit it certify it a letter goes into your news item go through the form submit it certify it a letter goes into your news you also get emails letting you know at the time when you get this letter to that the form's been certified it's been received so you're going to get a lot of things happening over and over again that are all very similar once your 471 has been submitted this is when your application is reviewed and this is when you wait and you wait and you wait for months possibly this is when USAC will look at your form see if everything's correct see if they have any questions let you fix things update things make changes whatever if you do hear from USAC they will send you'll get an email saying they have a request that then you need to answer you have to go into your epics account you got to log in to answer the questions now they don't do things with faxes as we used to do or emails back and forth they want everything collected into your account so it's all there for anyone to look at in one place if someone does contact you and you don't know what they're asking for or you can't figure out this is when you reach out to me I can translate and I do it for many many libraries I know some of you guys are on the line who have done this for I can translate what they're asking for what they're trying to say what they're looking for what they think is wrong with your application whatever USAC has a tendency to take four paragraphs to say something that could take like two sentences to ask so if you're not sure what you're supposed to do contact me I can log into your account and help you figure out how to answer the group in USAC that does this work is called their program integrity assurance PIA is the acronym for that so you'll get in contact from you know Bob Smith PIA reviewer USAC and that's who you need to reply back to with any of these questions once you've done any back and forth with that if there are everything's been answered that's when your funding commitment decision letter will be issued this is a letter that will let you know if you have been funded or not and or maybe reduced funding adjustments have been made you might get more than one of these for example if you submitted more than one 470 and 471 you may have more than one of these because they may evaluate and then review them differently when this letter is available now calls it a letter just like everything else used to be mailed to you now it goes into your epic account just like all the other notification letters you'll get an email that says epic notification e-rate funding commitment decision letter available look for this email you never know when this will come it could be in July August September November we've still got libraries we're getting it this month well last month you'll need to look at the find notice that this has come in it will not tell you in this email what the answer what your what their response is you'll have to log in to your epic account to actually see the funding commitment decision and what they've said when you log in at the very top of your landing page this is where you can look up all the different notifications for any of your forms you choose the notification form type you'll choose FCDL that's for funding commitment decision letter and the particular appropriate funding year it will then list it right here when you first go to this and I missed getting a screenshot on that unfortunately it will say generate notification you click on that it reloads this landing page and then it says view notification that's when you can go ahead and look at it viewing it will pop you over into your news just where everything else says you have to generate it yourself but they want to know that you actually went and did something and realized that it was there so you do have to physically generate it by clicking that button down here is this is just the letter it says thank you we've received it here's all the information down below what your next step is there's a barely see the bottom here I'll zoom it out a little there is a spreadsheet you can click on and open up and see the actual details of all the funding requests but they do summarize it here as well this is mine from last year on august 6th they said or they approved us for our $2300 $320 and we're good to go so from there is when you'd go on to the next form in the process but if you were denied you can do an appeal or reduce and you don't agree we can go through that with you I've done it with many log few libraries over the years it takes some time so do be prepared that your appeal will not be an immediate fix and immediately getting the money but you can do an appeal and we can see about getting things fix that you think might not work incorrectly denied so after you have your funding commitment decision letter the third form you have to do is the 486 and this is where many libraries lose it in the process as in they think they're done and they're not they've gotten a notification a funding commitment decision that says yes you've been approved and they're like yes I did it I'm done I got my money no what that letter actually means is this money's been set aside for you and you need to let us know that you still want it there may be reasons you don't want it it may be I've changed my mind about the service provider a service has been changed I need to make a change to what I'm actually getting as a service whatever but you've got to use the 46th up to the first three forms you always have to do before you get any money so this is very easy form actually all the information you need is actually in that funding commitment letter and it's automatically in your account to get to your 46th right up where those other forms were click on the form 40 six give it a nickname just like everything else put in your contact info what's great about this when you get farther into the form it automatically lists for you all of the service requests that you had put in everything you had listed in your 471 saying here's all the services we're getting and then it just says do you want these you add you select them and add them and say it's just saying yes you're adding them to the 486 you can't miss them out miss out on them there's a button to click all of them in this case I had four automatically select all four of them and pop them down to the bottom or you can pick and choose for some reason if you wanted to and add them individually you don't have to enter any of this information which I think is awesome previously we had to look in the actual funding commitment decision and make sure we copied it all in correctly now it's all automatically there for us you can't forget or miss one of them because it shows them all to you automatically something else to notice on the 46th to be aware of is these certifications it is different from the 470 and the 471 both of those you just check all the boxes and say I agree to all the rules and regulations for this one you do have to spec be specific about the SIPA certifications everybody checks early filing which is a misnomer just means yes my service is starting at the beginning of the funding year you only choose the waiver if you are in the middle of working on complying with the SIPA the the certification the SIPA rules which is the filtering they give you up to three years they give you three years to become in compliance it can take some time to figure out what you're going to do and do it all so this is just I'm in the middle of sort of of doing that however if you're not in the middle and you've already been doing filtering for a while and you're already in compliance do not check that box you will get held up potentially instead you go on to the next screen where you certify the first one is if you need to do this is the old if you need to do a technology plan you check that but it's not applying for and it doesn't apply to any future ones but at the bottom here you choose that you have to choose the correct SIPA certification the first one is that I have complied with everything second one is I'm in the middle of of working on it and the third one is it doesn't apply because I'm only applying for phone so you've got to make sure you pick the correct one here so that's something that I just bring your attention to pay attention to when it comes to the 46 you have 120 days after the funny commitment decision letter or service start date whichever is latest to do this I do pay attention to what you're doing I look at spreadsheets and pull up information to make sure that I know everyone's on track for doing all their forms so I will reach out to you some of you I know have gotten emails from me in the last month or so saying hey this is due you haven't done it yet that's what I'm here for I'll make sure that you get these things in in case you've missed and try and make sure you don't miss any deadlines when you do the 46 you'll get notified that it has been done just like all the other ones it goes into your news item see the repetition here letting you know that it's been done so that's the first three forms in this in the process the rest of the form are it depends and if you do them or not and they have to do with how you want to get your funding how you want to actually get your money so the rest of the forms in process are invoicing forms is what they're called 472 and 474 are the two basic forms that they talk about they use the term invoicing for you have a choice you can either pay all your bills in full and get reimbursed afterwards or you can automatically have your service provider discount all your bills as you go throughout the year and you don't have to do anything afterwards the reimbursement form is called the bear form you may have heard that that's when the libraries by submit the search provider form is called the spy form search provider invoice if you're doing discounts you as the library as the applicant submit the bear form if you're doing the reimbursements after the fact if you're doing discounts of your bills throughout the year your service provider for service submits the form themselves they give you a discount on your bill then they ask e-rate for the refund back of what they discounted you if you're doing those discounts we really encourage that as your choice because at this point you're done doing forms the forty six was your last form you had to do for the year the service provider for submits their form then now it's between them and e-rate to get the money and you're automatically given a discount if you do have to do the bear form however if for some reason your provider won't do it or you're doing services like some of those category two services that you have to wait to see if you pay for them and you gotta be reimbursed that's when you'd get into doing the bear form yourself and this is where things have changed with payments and it's a good thing previously for bear payments the money still filtered through your provider you submitted the bear form to e-rate then your provider was told okay give them the discount the right cut them a check for the money that became a problem for some libraries some providers didn't understand why they had to pass on costs or it wasn't working out correctly they decided to go direct to you now if you're gonna do a reimbursement after the fact you're gonna get a direct deposit into the library's bank account or whichever bank account the library's money is handled through if it's a city account the library has its own account whatever there's no longer any checks being filtered through the service provider in order to provide this information to USAC though you do have to give them your banking information this is a one time form you only have to submit this form once to give them the banking info info you do not have to do the 498 to do the provide the banking info every year unless the banking and that information changes measure basic information account number contact person account number routing number all the usual stuff that you do for a direct deposit you will need to also put in the federal ID number that's something used for payroll you may know it if your city clerk knows it whoever handles that would have that information this also might be a point as I mentioned earlier of giving someone else access to your epic account just enter this information I know we've had some city clerks that were a little hesitant about it let them do it themselves with their own account not a problem another new number you have to have is this Dunn and Bradstreet number it's another number about giving business doing business something the FCC is requiring you can look up and see if you have one and if not you can apply to get one it's free to any but libraries are doing it for this purpose with e-rate and same as some of the FCC numbers you're looking for you ask for they send you it quickly in an email boom you enter it into your form it's a little confusing that there's all these new numbers you have to know but luckily all of them are really easy to get and have assigned to you as far as this process and you only gotta do it once so to get to your 498 it is different it's not one of the three main forms for 7071 for 86 you click on the name of your library over here underneath the logo on your landing page and then on the left there's a related actions option and then way down on the bottom of the list there's of this there's create your 498 it's just like a lot of the other forms enter a nickname for it go through all the steps I don't have screenshots of this because I didn't want to show you the library commission's banking info but you'd go through the process of entering all the information in here now just like any other way of doing direct deposit you not only have to submit the form with the info but you have to give some sort of a documentation usually when you've done