Cash Conversion

This article describes how cash in the MARS’ Federal Fund will be converted to eMARS. It will describe some of the things that may go wrong with this conversion if grant accountants are not diligent about maintaining the crosswalk in the MPS database until they are asked to submit it on June 30.

Every dollar of cash residing in the Federal Fund when financial activity in MARS ceases during the weekend of July 8 and 9 will be converted to eMARS. Ideally, every dollar that is converted to eMARS will be associated with an eMARS program structure in the MPS database.

Since late November 2005 agency grant accountants have been encouraged to appropriately deal with residual cash balances identified with closed/inactive grants that will not convert to eMARS. This activity may have involved any or all of the following:

• Transferring cash from a state fund to cover residual cash deficits;


• Transferring positive residual cash balances to a state fund; or


• Consolidating positive residual cash balances in a pseudo-grant to mitigate the Federal Fund cash deficit that would result from transferring it to a state fund prior to the implementation of eMARS.

Grant accountants’ diligence to this effort will be measurable by the proportion of Federal Fund cash that is identified with eMARS’ program structures (i.e., grants or pseudo-grants).