About This Manual

This User's Guide provides a basic knowledge and understanding of MARS ADVANTAGE and its functions. It presents a detailed description of MARS functions, capabilities, and reports. It is specifically focused on assisting financial managers and users in the billing, payroll, purchasing, budgeting, and accounting offices with attaining MARS data and reports.

The goal of this User's Guide is to give you the information and skills necessary to input meaningful data into MARS, correct errors, interpret reports, and otherwise carry on daily accounting, bookkeeping, and clerical practices through MARS. After reviewing this manual, you should be able to:

Explain how the various controls and system options affect the data processing.
Outline the relationships among various data elements

This chapter contains the following topics:

Topic	Contents
Organization	Provides a list of the chapters included in this User's Guide and a list of the MARS subsystems.
Typographical Conventions	Explains the various formatting conventions used in MARS documentation.
Related Information	Describes other MARS documentation.

Organization

This manual is arranged according to financial management areas (for example, budgeting, expenditure accounting and revenue accounting.) This guide is divided into the following chapters and appendices as outlined below:

Chapter	Contents
Introduction	Provides an overview of MARS functionality and provides a processing overview necessary for understanding how MARS works. This chapter also outlines the differences between the Standard and Extended Budgeting models and summarizes management responsibilities for MARS.
The Database	Discusses the MARS database in detail, focusing on the concept of master tables and ledgers within MARS.
The Chart of Accounts	Describes the chart of accounts, the various reporting hierarchies available, and other special-use or default codes in MARS.
System Controls and Options	Describes the many processing and control options and features offered by MARS. All of these features involve management-level decisions that must be made before processing begins. This chapter aids users in selecting the features that best suit their needs.
Reports	Discusses the reporting capabilities and standard reports. Report descriptions and samples are found in the User's Reference .
Extended Budgeting	Describes the budgeting capabilities of the MARS Extended Budgeting modules.
Expenditure Accounting, Revenue Accounting, and General Accounting	Contains information on coding requirements, system-maintained tables affected, and accounting transaction models, as well as specialized discussions appropriate to each section including purchasing, payables, disbursements, and receivables.
Travel Management, Inventory Control, Fixed Assets, Job Costing, Projects, Grants, Project Billing, Cost Allocation	Contains specific information and examples for other processes in MARS.
Monthly Closing	Discusses accounting period closing. The discussion provides an explanation of open items clearing and any other programs required to officially close an accounting period in MARS.
Annual Closing and Annual Functions	Describes annual closing and fiscal year-end functions.
Planning	Describes the planning module. It is organized in a similar fashion to the accounting modules discussed in the first four chapters.
Online Job Submission	Discusses how to submit a job (e.g. report) online in MARS.

A Standardized Manual

This manual is a standardized document for all installations. Field names used throughout the manual are MARS ADVANTAGE standard names. Even though field names used at your installation may differ from those used in the following chapters, the explanations still apply.

Similarly, windows shown in this manual are standard windows or suggestions of window layouts; they contain columns for all optional codes in the system. Windows designed by your entity, however, may contain only those columns needed to provide the level of reporting desired, and may contain space for non-MARS information as well. Even though the windows themselves may look different, the explanations and coding instructions included in this manual still apply to your installation.

Typographical Conventions

The following typographical conventions are used in this document:

"Double quotes" indicate either a chapter, paragraph title, or example text.
Italic s indicates a book title
Bold/Italic indicates specific data to be entered into a field (e.g., "Enter Monthly to indicate the invoice is sent once a month.").
Bold indicates:
Fields where data is entered (e.g, "Enter the Vendor code in Vendor .")
Words that have all or title capitalization indicate push buttons (e.g., "Select OK to close the window.").

Terms that are separated by colons indicate selections from cascading menus such as the menu shown below. Making a selection from a cascading menu is one way of performing commands.

Throughout this manual, selections from cascading menus are shown in a short form that indicates which choice to make as you move through the sequence of menus. For example, to make the menu selections shown above, you would select the Display menu from the menu bar and then select the Browse Data option. In the short form, that series of selections is indicated as: Select Display:Browse Data.

Related Information

You can find related information about MARS ADVANTAGE in the following sources.

Getting Started provides information about logging on and off, using the MARS ADVANTAGE Desktop, navigating through the system, entering data into MARS, and performing inquiries.
User's Reference provides detailed descriptions for each field on every window in MARS, as well as a description and sample of each report.
System Administration Guide describes processing cycles and jobs, special functions, and maintenance.