If this is something your department decides to fund, it should be recorded in SAFE. Depending on the circumstances, you could accomplish it in different ways.

If this is an isolated request, specific to the student’s needs and you don’t want to advertise it as a funding opportunity for other students to apply to, you could enter it as a FUNDER-INITIATED award. You simply create a new funding opportunity and select “funder-initiated” for the type of award. It won’t appear in any student's search; rather, it’s just a placeholder from which you award. If your department does more than one of these kind of awards, you could use this same funder-initiated opportunity to make all of those awards.

If you want to allow other students to apply for this funding also, you could create another student-initiated opportunity and call it, for example, “x Dept. Conference Travel Fund".

In these cases, the funding should be recorded in SAFE as a Funder-Initiated Award to the student--even if the payment has already been made. This way, other potential funders are aware of what the student has already been awarded.

You can award the money to the student via your funder-initiated opportunity. If the student had already created a project in SAFE, you can select this project from the drop down and attach your award to the existing project.

If a student misses the deadline for the opportunity, funders need not honor requests for late applications. If there is an extenuating circumstance and you decide to allow the late application, you will need to change the publication and application dates to "reopen" your opportunity for a very short time (e.g. one day). It is possible, though that you may receive other applications during the same time.