Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector

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Chapter 1
Chapter 4

Have you found yourself creating your own budgeting exercises for your students? Are you frustrated by books that teach the theory of budgeting but offer students little opportunity to apply new skills and techniques? Then Budget Tools is for you.

Developed in classrooms, Budget Tools brings together scores of exercises that will take students through the process of public budgeting, from organizing data, through analysis and presentation. Using budgets from all levels of government, as well as from nonprofits, the authors have students work with real budgeting data to cover a range of topics and skills, such as historical analysis, forecasting, cost analysis, pension analysis, performance-based budgeting, debt structure and management, cash flow estimates and variance analysis, classifying and categorizing data, as well as memo writing and multi-year planning.

The accompanying CD includes datasets, examples, and spreadsheets to support the exercises in the book. Each exercise comes with solutions available to instructors who adopt the book for their courses. To download solutions to Budget Tools exercises, instructors must visit http://college.cqpress.com/instructors-resources/budgettools/ and register for a new account.

An Excel primer in the book’s final pages provides a quick and handy reference for students as they master basic skills and then move on to more advanced functions. The reference value that this book provides ensures that students will hold on to it long after they leave your classroom.

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.

Dall W. Forsythe teaches governmental and nonprofit financial management at the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University. Forsythe has extensive management experience in the governmental, private, and nonprofit sectors, including the State of New York, the New York City Board of Education, Lehman Brothers’ public finance department, and the Episcopal Diocese of New York. Among his previous books is Memos to the Governor: An Introduction to State Budgeting.

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).