The E-rate Productivity Center (EPC) is your window to the E-rate Program, where you can apply for funding, upload and manage documentation, and communicate with USAC. EPC was rolled out in July 2015 and is new for Funding Year 2016.

Improvements and updates in EPC

If you’ve applied online before, you’ll notice some changes since last year.  EPC provides a number of advantages over the old USAC system. It:

• Stores all forms, supporting documentation, and communications from USAC,
• Can be accessed on any common browser,
• Allows you to easily import organization-level information (like addresses, student counts, and square footage) onto forms,
• Shows a complete list of consortium/consultants’ members/clients,
• Doesn’t require a PIN, and
• Allows you to add multiple users with different permission levels, including the ability to limit access to only certain forms.

Tour of the EPC landing page

Once you’re logged in, the first thing you’ll see is your “Landing Page.” It has information about the schools/libraries you’re associated with, and links to actions you can take. Here’s what it looks like:

If you need to get back to your landing page at any time, you can click the USAC logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page, or click the “Reports” tab, then “My Landing Page.”

On your landing page, you will find these sections:

• My Entities (Organizations)
  A list of your parent and child organizations – parent first, followed by children. Each organization name is an active link to its profile (more on this coming next week).
• My Tasks
  A list of open tasks for you or someone in your organization to complete. For example, forms that are started but not completed/certified, questions from USAC during application review, and other communications from USAC.
• Customer Service Cases
  Questions or requests you submitted to USAC through EPC. You can ask a question, make a request, or attach documents to an existing case.
• FCC Forms
  A list of forms started and certified by your organization. You can filter by funding year, form type, and form status to limit your results. You will have the option to see each form in this section as they become available in EPC.

And on the top of the screen, there are five tabs:

• News
  Notices from USAC and your parent organization. This is where you’ll find information that was formerly printed and mailed, and questions from USAC during application review.
• Tasks
  Notifications of actions that you or someone in the organization must take, such as completing a form, certifying a form, or answering application review questions.
• Records
  Organizations and documents in the system. You can use “records” to search for applicants, service providers, consultants, and certified program forms.
• Reports
  Access to reports about your application and organizations. For now, the only report available is your landing page. More reports will be added in the future!
• Actions
  General user submissions, such as opening a customer service case.

EPC Resources

We hope you find EPC easy to use, and we look forward to improving it throughout the funding year. More information about navigating EPC is available on our website:

• User Guide: Navigating EPC
• Webinar recording: Introducing EPC, the E-rate Productivity Center
• Login and resources: E-rate Productivity Center Homepage