Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-for-Profit Organizations (3rd Edition) download epub

Finkler et al: Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-for-Profit Organizations

3rd Edition

This was the book assigned to me for my class specifically for Nonprofit Financial Management as I pursue my MBA specifically for Nonprofit management.

As textbooks go, it is serviceable. The writing is clean and clear, and is easily understandable for someone that has some background in accounting. I am the Director of Finance at a nonprofit, and I was able to pick up a number of useful things from this, though a lot of it was review.

A couple of things bothered me a bit. There is a chapter about the time value of money (here it is chapter five). The book teaches the student how to approach the problems from a point where the unknowns are plugged into excel. This may just be me being old fashioned, but to me it skipped a step in being overly reliant on technology instead of going back one step and showing the derivation and making the student go through the motions to get an understanding of where excel is coming from. It’s not that it isn’t there - for example the derivation of finding the value of the annuity is footnoted, in small print. Again, a small concern, but one nevertheless.

A second thing is to look at the cost. Due to a mix up with the professor’s syllabus, I had first bought the third edition of this book, before being told that the fourth edition was the only acceptable one. The problem is that at the time, the third edition was less than half the price of the fourth edition. The kicker was I ended up with both of the editions side by side, and looking at the first three chapters I noticed no discernible difference. This may not be true in later chapters as I didn’t make the comparison. If you are assigning the text, have a look at the third edition for the student’s sake.

Terrible text. Explanations for charts are frequently on the page before or after, so you have to flip back and forth to see the chart or explanations. No color anywhere. Key concepts could stand out more of done in color, listed in margins, boxed in the text. It is just word after word crammed on a page so as to squeeze as much as possible in as little space as possible. There are so many far superior ways to present this material. How about some real world examples instead of just using examples from three fictional entities? It would make the information more interesting to show how it is used in actual situations. The problems are frustrating to do because the information presented in the chapter is usually inadequate to slow one to work the problems. Much time is wasted trying to figure out the problems becuase the the terms are different from what was explained in the chapter. For the money that this cost, it is a shame. Spending so much on a text would not be so objectionable if it would help one to learn. This book is dull, unimaginative, poorly put together, and utterly frustrating.

If this text is the sole required text for a public finance course with an incompetent instructor, you are in serious trouble. I'm not even sure if this text makes a good reference book in a situation in which you have a decent instructor.

The text gives you the basic vocabulary needed to get your feet wet in the world of public finance. I'm not sure if it provides anything beyond that so be prepared to do some reading elsewhere. My main complaint is that reading is basic and often focuses unnecessarily on basic, trivial concepts. However, some of the practice questions are beyond the scope of the book. What a puzzling experience.

What can you say about a text book. It was a good purchase and I received excellent service from seller. Not to mention saving about 150 bucks on the book. At the college book store it cost a lot more new or used..

Used this book for the most boring class ever. Obviously this isn't the kind of book u beg to buy but it's definitely the cheapest

I had to have this book for class 6 weeks ago, I paid extra for expedited shipping, and I have now had to take 3 quizzes without this book. And this book still says it was supposed to have arrived two weeks ago. I use amazon for all of my text book purchases in grad school, but I will make sure to avoid this guy from now on.

Good read

While most textbooks on this subject can be dry and wordy, this text is actually quite helpful and offers easy to understand examples. It is a great resource for learning budgeting for the public sector and is very helpful for understanding one piece of nonprofit or government budgeting.