Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector

This thoroughly revised text has been restructured - it now has 30compact modules to focus on individual skills and enhance flexibility, and is reorganized to cover more straightforward skills early in the book and more complex tools later on. Using budgets from all levels of government as well as from nonprofit organizations, the authors give students the opportunity to work with real budgeting data to cover a range of topics and skills. Budget Tools provides instruction in the techniques and implementation of budgeting skills at a granular level to support a wide range of approaches to teaching the subject.

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction Module 1: The Craft of Budgeting Part 2: Budget Tools Module 2: Organizing Budget Data Module 3: Fixed and Variable Costs Module 4: Breakeven Analysis Module 5: Cost Allocation Module 6: Time Value of Money Module 7: Inflation Module 8: Sensitivity Analysis Module 9: Integrating Budgeting With Performance Part 3: The Budget Process Module 10: The Budget Process: An Overview Module 11: The Budget Document Module 12: Determining the Baseline Budget Module 13: Decision Packages: Cost Estimates Module 14: Decision Packages: Budget Justifications Module 15: Budget Cutbacks Module 16: Legislative Budget Tools Part 4: Capital Budgeting and Asset Management Module 17: Cost-Benefit Analysis Module 18: Life Cycle Costing Module 19: Capitalization and Depreciation Module 20: Long-Term Financing Module 21: Investment Strategies Part 5: Budget Implementation Module 22: Operating Plan and Variance Analysis Module 23: Cash Management and Internal Controls Module 24: Forecasting and Managing Cash Flow Module 25: Government and Nonprofit Accounting Module 26: Financial Statement Analysis Part 6: Advanced Tools Module 27: Calculating Payroll Module 28: Basic Forecasting Concepts Module 29: Forecasting Intermediate Forecasting Module 30: Forecasting Advanced Intermediate Methods

About the Author :
Greg G. Chen is associate professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, City University of New York. He was a manager of the budgeting and financial reporting department in the Ministry of Finance, and budget manager and senior policy adviser for the Premier’s Office of British Columbia, Canada, before taking his professorship in the United States. He had previously been an associate dean in the College of WISCO in China. Professor Chen conducts research and publishes papers in the areas of budgeting and financial management for nonprofit organizations and governments, program evaluation and cost-benefit analysis of diverse public programs, and comparisons of the health care systems and finance in Canada, the United States, and China. Lynne A. Weikart was associate professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, City University of New York, until her retirement. She is currently a practitioner in residence at James Madison University, where she teaches budgeting and financial management. Before her academic career, she held several high-level government positions, including budget director of the Division of Special Education in New York City (NYC) public schools and executive deputy commissioner of the New York State Division of Human Rights. For several years, she also served as the executive director of a nonprofit, City Project, a progressive fiscal think tank focused on reforming NYC’s resource allocation patterns. Weikart’s current research focuses on resource allocation in urban areas as well as on urban finance, and she has published many articles on these subjects. She is author of Follow the Money: Who Controls New York City Mayors? (2009) and the coauthor with Greg Chen of Budgeting and Financial Management for Nonprofits (2012). The latter was CQ Press. She won the Luther Gulick Award for Outstanding Academic from the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration in 2001.   Daniel W. Williams has taught budgeting at Baruch College since 1995. His research includes budgeting, forecasting and the history of public administration. Before his academic career, Williams spent nineteen years with the Virginia Medicaid program, including nine years as the Budget Director of the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services. For five years he served on a local Community Board in Manhattan, where he was for three years the chair of the budget committee. He has received the Abraham J. Briloff Prize in Ethics, Baruch College, and the Outstanding Paper Award 2002-2003, International Journal of Forecasting (with Don Miller).