Can someone help me figure out timing/logistics?

[a2jc4life]

I'm a little bit confused about how best to proceed, in terms of timing.  Admissions is not very helpful, giving pretty vague answers, so I'm hoping someone more experienced with the general process will be able to be more helpful.

I want to start classes at Ashford in late December/early January.  I can't start much later than that or it will cause a mess with my financial aid.  (I will have been out of school for more than 6 months.)  I'm told I need to apply within the next couple of weeks for enrollment in December classes.  But I'm still working through my general ed stuff (hope to be done by the end of this month, or maybe midway through November for the last class if statistics takes me a while).

Apparently the way Ashford works is that you apply, enroll in your first class, and when you've gotten partway through the first class (3 weeks, if I recall correctly), maintaining a passing grade, they evaluate your prior credits.  This doesn't make any sense to me, because I don't understand how they decide what class you need to enroll in first if they don't know what you already have. :/  Or how much to charge, if they don't know whether you qualify for the StraighterLine partner pricing.  Etc.

But that timing all matters, because if applying now means I make a mess of things since I don't have all my credits on a transcript yet, I need to wait -- but then that might push my enrollment back too far.  If applying now has no impact on what credits I'm bringing with me, as long as I have them done by December, then I can apply immediately.

Is this making any sense?