SSS and Clarity Financial Aid: What They Ask

The bookmark still says SSS. What opens now is Ravenna. And Clarity, the other form a private school might hand you, has already rolled over to next year's application. The fastest way to waste $65 this week is to fill in the one you were pointed at last spring.

On July 1, 2026 VenturEd Solutions announced that School and Student Services, the financial aid form independent schools have used for decades, is now Ravenna Financial Aid, with, in its own words, no changes to data, pricing or contracts and no action required from schools. Six weeks later the other big form flipped years: Clarity's help center records that as of August 17, 2026 the platform moved to the 2027/28 school year, and that a family who still needs a 2026/27 application has to fill in the 27/28 one and then ask the school to switch the enrollment year.

A parent arriving in late August finds a renamed vendor, a form set to next year, and a school website last updated in spring. None of that changes what the questions ask.

Everything below was read on August 29, 2026 and describes the 2026-27 cycle, the year both vendors have published complete family documentation for. The SSS parent pages still resolve at solutionsbysss.com, the company home page now redirects to ravennasolutions.com, and the family portal is still at sssandtadsfa.my.site.com. Fees, deadlines and methodology tables reset every year, and nothing here is financial or legal advice.

Two fees, one household, no refunds

The SSS Financial Aid Application Workbook for 2026-2027 runs thirty-one pages and reaches the money on page 2: on the Pay and Submit screen you choose a payment method for $60.00, and once you submit, your information goes to the schools immediately, cannot be withdrawn from the SSS system, and cannot be refunded. Clarity's fee is $65 per household, also flat across any number of children and schools, also non-refundable once captured.

Two flat fees. Two traps around them.

The first is the academic year. The SSS portal can have applications open for two years at once, and the workbook is blunt about the consequence: refunds are not available for applications submitted for the incorrect academic year. With Clarity already on 27/28 and SSS heading the same way, that is not hypothetical this month.

The second is the document deadline, which is not the application deadline. On SSS the My Documents tab only activates after you pay, and uploads are reviewed and tagged before they count, a step the workbook says typically takes up to three business days. A file uploaded the night before is not a completed requirement the next morning.

The half of the form that is not about your paycheck

People brace for the income questions and get ambushed by the household ones. The 2026-27 workbook's expense section asks for the year's utilities, charitable contributions, out-of-pocket medical premiums, uninsured medical costs itemized by type, child support and alimony paid, the cost of camps, lessons, tutors and test prep for each child, dues for any social or athletic club costing more than $250, and the total cost of all family vacations taken in 2025. Then every vehicle in the household by type, make, model, year, ownership status, current debt and annual lease cost, including the ones bought for your children.

Then unusual expenses, which have a defined shape. The workbook counts nursing home or assisted living care, current legal fees, closing costs on a purchase or refinance, tuition the parents themselves are paying, uninsured disaster losses, special costs for a child with a diagnosed disability, funeral expenses and union dues. It excludes charity, commuting and routine home repair, which is where most people's instinct goes first.

And one question that is not a number at all: what you can pay. The workbook asks for a realistic estimate and explains why it wants one, which is that aid officers find it useful to see what the family thinks it can manage. A person reads that box.

If you own the business, the form pries you apart from it

This is where self-employed families lose an evening, and where the two vendors converge on the same paperwork.

SSS separates you from your company line by line. Taxable salaries and wages take only the W-2 salary you pay yourself, never the profit or loss. The Business/Farm section then wants gross receipts, cost of goods sold, salaries paid to you and your spouse, business rent and mortgage, and total depreciation claimed, pulled from Schedule C line 13, Schedule E line 23d, Schedule F line 14, Form 1065 line 16c or Form 1120-S line 14. Business assets and debts go in their own boxes, in both directions: no personal assets in the business fields, no business debts in the personal ones.

Clarity comes at the same paperwork from the other end. Its business owners article assumes you may not be sure what your entity is and has you read it off the return: a Schedule C carrying the LLC's information means the LLC is taxed as a sole proprietorship, a farm files Schedule F, and if there is no Schedule C you look at page 2 of Schedule E, where a P means a partnership that filed Form 1065 and an S means an S-corporation that filed Form 1120-S, either one having sent you a Schedule K-1. The C-corporation is the exception, because its income never reaches your 1040 at all. It files its own Form 1120.

What that equity is worth to the calculation is not obvious, and the NAIS Methodology Computation Manual shows the arithmetic. Business debts come off business assets, the remainder is multiplied by percent of ownership, and a negative result becomes zero. Only a portion of that value then folds into household net worth, because those assets also produce the family's income: in the manual's worked example a business worth $66,300 net contributes $27,408.

One caveat governs every figure taken from that manual, here and below. NAIS keeps the current edition behind a member login, and the copy that opens without one is the 2023-2024 edition, posted by a member school. Its structure is what to read. Its dollar tables are three years old and appear here as illustrations of the arithmetic, not as this year's numbers.

One flag is worth knowing about. The manual lists an unusual condition message that fires when a 1040 shows business profit or loss while the application declares no business, and the suggested response is to ask the parent to complete the business questions and resubmit. A skipped section does not go unnoticed. It generates a message with your name on it.

Small inconsistency inside the 2026-27 workbook itself: the personal income questions ask for 2025 and 2026 estimated, while two business questions on page 10 still carry 2024 and 2025 labels. Answer whatever the live form asks on screen.

Two households file twice, and the two files get compared

If the child's parents live apart, SSS treats them as two applications. The workbook says a noncustodial parent, or a parent with joint custody in a separate household, goes in the Other Parent section and must also complete a separate application, with everything else you answer covering only the parents in your household. Its FAQ states the underlying rule in one line: SSS considers divorced parents or guardians living apart to be separate households, and each should complete a separate application. The Other Parent block then makes you classify the arrangement from a fixed list — never married, divorced, separated with no court action, separated legally — plus the year of the divorce or separation and whether a joint custody agreement exists.

SSS does not publish an answer for every arrangement, and it does not pretend to. The question sits instead on the list of things it tells families to put to the school directly: if you are separated or divorced, how does the school evaluate your family's financial status and ability to pay?

Clarity draws the household line at the fee instead: its fee article says separate households each pay the $65. Inside a single application two guardians share one tax verification form and sign it one at a time — the first signs and presses finish, the page reloads, the second signs. Add a guardian in Step 1 after that form has been signed and it can no longer be edited, which becomes a support ticket rather than a fix.

Three things in the 2023-24 manual surprise people here, and unlike its dollar tables these are procedures rather than figures. A contribution from the noncustodial household is added to the custodial household's contribution to reach a total family figure. Administrators are told to check the two forms for agreement, meaning the child support you report receiving is read against what the other household reports paying. And on prenuptial agreements, the guidance is that while such agreements should be carefully considered, administrators should not feel bound by them. A stepparent's income and assets are in scope. A document between the adults does not bind the school.

Where the house lands

Home equity is in, and the manual says why without hedging: families with assets have greater financial strength than those with none. It is present market value minus unpaid principal on all mortgages and equity loans. SSS asks for purchase year, purchase price, current market value, first mortgage balance and total annual payments including property taxes, interest, insurance and association fees, plus the balance, payments and purpose of any second mortgage or home equity loan. If you are unsure of the market value, the workbook suggests an online resource and names Zillow. Clarity's homeowners article sends you to your most recent assessment first and to sites such as Zillow only if you do not have one.

The cap is the part nobody hears about. Where home equity is large relative to income, the methodology caps it at three times the parents' total income. The 2023-24 manual walks it through in round numbers: a family with $60,000 of income and $250,000 of equity has $180,000 counted and $70,000 protected, and an unusual condition message tells the aid officer the cap was applied. The multiple is the durable part of that example. The dollars are there to show it working. A long-held house in an expensive market is not automatically the disaster families assume it is.

Student assets get divided across the years the student has left in school plus four years of college, so a younger child's savings spread thinner. If the grade is missing the methodology assumes grade nine and divides by eight.

Verification fails on spelling more often than on money

Both systems now pull tax data directly. SSS calls its route Easy Apply and the workbook labels it the preferred path, with consent given through ID.me or through a manual verification instead. Clarity runs its own IRS verification and publishes why it fails: a shortened or preferred first name that does not match the 1040 or W-2, an address mismatch such as the wrong street suffix, a corrected return still processing, an active audit, the wrong filing status.

Not one of those is about how much money you have. Clarity is blunt about why that matters: the IRS does not say which detail failed, an application carries only one tax verification form, and so everything on that form has to agree with the 1040 before it goes in. When the match fails, an email arrives with a link and a list, and the article names the pages you may be asked for — 1040 pages 1 and 2, Schedule 1 where line 8 or line 10 carries an amount, Schedule C where Schedule 1 line 3 does, Schedule E where line 5 does, Schedule SE where line 15 does, and every Schedule C or E if you have more than one.

SSS makes the same point in its own register and makes it twice, once over the parent block and once over the student block: enter names exactly as they appear on tax and official forms. Its FAQ covers the other half of the problem. Do not leave items blank, and do not type a symbol or the words none, unknown or N/A where a number belongs.

The number is a guideline, and the school owns the decision

The chain, stripped down. The methodology uses the most recently completed full tax year. It subtracts nondiscretionary items and an income protection allowance built from Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey data, set at 80 percent of the median expenditure for a family of four and scaled by family size, leaving discretionary income. That is assessed at a rate that rises as it grows, the student's asset contribution is added, and out comes an estimated family contribution per student. The school subtracts that from its own cost of attendance to get need. The 2023-24 manual also warns administrators that even a school meeting full need may still be asking parents for $3,000 to $5,000 beyond tuition in fees, books, transportation and the rest — a three-year-old figure, and not one that anything since has pushed downward.

Then comes the sentence that outranks the arithmetic. The family contribution calculated by the methodology is not law; a school should use it as a guideline alongside its own policies and a review of the family's tax returns. The SSS workbook says the same thing in the family's language: schools make all awarding decisions based on their own policies and budget, and questions about an award go to the school's financial aid leader.

Clarity does not even produce a contribution figure. Its help center states flatly that it provides no expected family contribution, and that each school determines the expected contribution using its own formula. Nor does it tell you the outcome; results come from the school, on the school's timetable.

NAIS puts the same responsibility on member schools. Its Principles of Good Practice for Financial Aid Administration say the school takes full ownership of final financial aid decisions when working with third-party vendors, and keeps need-based aid administratively distinct from tuition assistance that is not based on need. NAIS calls the principles a standard members abide by in spirit rather than required actions, and its own copy sits behind a member login, which is why the version linked here is one a member school posted publicly.

Which answers the reconsideration question. Neither vendor's software has an appeal button, because neither vendor made the decision. Updated information submitted to SSS produces a revised contribution figure that goes out to the designated schools, but the decision itself is reopened with the financial aid office, in writing, with the document that shows what changed.

The ESA question the form makes you answer

SSS asks how you paid for the current year's education expenses and how you will pay next year, by source: financial aid, parents, student assets or earnings, loans, friends and relatives, trust funds, other. Whatever a state program sends on your behalf is disclosed there.

Whether you can hold a state award and a school's own grant at the same time is a question for the program, not the form, and at least one state writes the prohibition into the parent agreement. Arizona's A.R.S. section 15-2402(B)(3) has the parent agree not to accept a scholarship from a school tuition organization concurrently with an Empowerment Scholarship Account in the same year. That clause names STO scholarships, which is not the same thing as a school spending its own budget on your child, and the distinction is worth an email to the program office and the school before anyone signs. Not sure which instrument your state runs on? Start with the difference between an ESA, a voucher and a tax-credit scholarship, then what its application asks for and when it closes. Tuition paid partly from a college savings account is a third source to declare, with its own K-12 limits.

Four dates go on the calendar, and they are rarely the same day: the school's deadline to submit the application, its separate deadline for supporting documents, the date it says decisions go out, and the date its enrollment contract and deposit are due. Ask the financial aid office for all four in one email, and get the answer in writing, before you pay $60 or $65 to a company that will not be deciding anything.