Fairness Policies, Eligibility Screening and Poverty Guidelines

Deciding each request on its merits gets harder the more requests you take. These three screens let you write the rule once, so the fifteenth family gets the same answer as the first.

When you’d use this

• You decided rent help is capped at one request per household per quarter and want that enforced, not remembered.
• A program is funded on income eligibility and you need a defensible screening record.
• A household is just over the line and you are going to help them anyway, on the record.
• A funder asks how you determine who qualifies.

Fairness policies

Nonprofit > Aid & Assistance > Fairness Policies holds one policy per assistance class. Muin enforces them at intake and at approval, so a request that would exceed a cap is caught before anyone promises anything.

To write one:

1. Click New policy.
2. Choose the Assistance class it governs.
3. Choose the Period: per week, month, quarter or year.
4. Choose Applies to: Per household or Per person.
5. Set either or both caps:
   • Max amount per period: leave blank for no dollar cap.
   • Max requests per period: leave blank for no count cap.
6. Optionally set Typical amount. It is advisory, and it grounds the AI reviewer so its recommendations match what you actually give.
7. Tick Require eligibility screening before approval if a household must be screened first.
8. Leave Policy active ticked. Unticking it disables enforcement without deleting the policy.
9. Add Notes for whoever reads this after you.

Each policy shows as Active or Disabled, with Edit and Delete on the row. Deleting tells you the consequence first: that class becomes unrestricted until a new policy is created.

Screen a household

Nonprofit > Distribution > Eligibility runs one household against one eligibility profile.

1. Search for the Person by name and select them. Change swaps to somebody else.
2. Pick the eligibility profile to screen against.
3. Enter Household income (annual) and Household size.
4. Click Run Screening.

The result is one of four:

Result	Meaning
Eligible	The household qualifies under this profile
Ineligible	It does not
Needs Review	The rule cannot decide; a human must
Overridden	Somebody approved it against the rule, on the record

The result also shows the household’s position as a percentage of the federal poverty level, so you can see how close to a line they are.

Record an override

If you are going to help a household the rule says does not qualify, do it here rather than quietly.

1. Write the Override reason.
2. Click Override with Reason.
3. Confirm. Muin states plainly what you are doing: your name and your reason are stored on the screening record permanently and will appear in any compliance or funder audit, and the original determination is kept alongside it.

That record is what makes the decision defensible. An undocumented exception is the one an auditor asks about.

Poverty guidelines

Nonprofit > Distribution > Poverty Guidelines holds the income thresholds screening reads. Muin ships the current HHS poverty guidelines for household sizes 1 through 12: the table for the 48 contiguous states and DC, and the two separate HHS tables for the non-contiguous states.

1. Pick the year with the filter at the top.
2. Pick the geography tab: 48 States, or the tab for either non-contiguous state.
3. Edit an income cell directly if your program uses a different threshold.
4. Click Save Changes.

Export CSV gives you the table for a grant application or a board packet.

This screen is available to US organizations. If you do not see it, the poverty-guideline feature is not enabled for your country.

What it affects

• A policy is enforced at intake and at approval. A request that would exceed it is stopped in the review cockpit, not after the money has gone.
• Require eligibility screening before approval makes a screening record a precondition for approving that class, so the approve action waits on it.
• Typical amount feeds the AI reviewer’s recommendation. Setting it honestly makes the recommendations useful; leaving it blank makes them generic.
• Editing a poverty-guideline figure changes every screening run afterwards, including the percentage-of-poverty-level figure on past comparisons.
• Overrides are permanent and audit-visible. They are the record, not a workaround for it.

When it goes wrong

What you see	What it means	What to do
Couldn’t load policies	The policy list failed to load	Reload the page.
No fairness policies yet	Nothing is capped	Every class is unrestricted until you write a policy. Start with the class you give most often.
You deleted a policy and limits stopped applying	That is what deleting does	Create a replacement policy. Untick Policy active next time if you only want to pause enforcement.
We couldn’t run that search	The person search itself failed	This does NOT mean the person is missing. Try again in a moment.
Nobody matched that	The search ran and found nothing	Check the spelling, or add them under People first, then screen them here.
Needs Review on a screening	The rule could not decide from what you entered	Check Household income and Household size are both right, then either decide by hand or record an override.
An approval is blocked pending screening	The class’s policy requires a screening record	Run the screening first, then approve.
No data for {year} on poverty guidelines	No table exists for that year and geography	Pick a year that has data, or enter the figures and save.
No data to export	The table you are viewing is empty	Load a year with data before exporting.
The Poverty Guidelines menu entry is missing	The feature is not enabled for your country	It is available to US organizations. Ask an administrator.

Next step

With the rules set, schedule the pickups: Scheduling aid and stewarding the relationship.