Overview
Transfer credits are imported on the transcriptCourse feed. On the transcriptCourse feed, academicCalendar and courseSection records are required fields, but often these records don't exist in the SIS. Instead, transfer credits are associated with a course record in the SIS, not a courseSection record.
If transfer credits are already associated with course sections in your SIS, this should not be an issue.
Creating Transfer Terms and Sections
To solve this, many institutions "manufacture" associated academicCalendar and courseSection records so that the transcriptCourse records can import into SS&E. The following formats are commonly used and recommended by Watermark.
The academicCalendar and courseSection records can either be generic (ex: "WM.SIS.TRANSFER" and "WM.SIS.TRANSFER.SPAN_341") or more specific to include year and/or term (ex: "WM.SIS.TRANSFER.2015" and "WM.SIS.TRANSFER.2015.SPAN_341" or "WM.SIS.TRANSFER.SU2015" and "WM.SIS.TRANSFER.SU2015.SPAN_341").
In the student profile in SS&E, course sections are organized by term on both the Courses tab and the Transcript tab, so most institutions prefer to use a generic transfer term to keep all transfer credits in one place, rather than specific transfer terms.
Section number is often set to a default value of "TR".
Other Credit Types
The same issue can happen for other types of credits on the transcriptCourse feed, including AP credit, test for credit, old migrated data, and any other credits that are not associated with a courseSection. For those, the same solution can be used, replacing "WM.SIS.TRANSFER" with "WM.SIS.OTHER".