Budget Tools

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.

The thoroughly updated and expanded Second Edition of Greg G. Chen, Lynne A. Weikart, and Daniel W. Williams' Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector brings together scores of exercises that will take students through the process of public budgeting, from organizing data through analysis and presentation. This thoroughly revised text has been restructured - it now has 30 compact 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.

Part 1: IntroductionModule 1: The Craft of BudgetingPart 2: Budget ToolsModule 2: Organizing Budget DataModule 3: Fixed and Variable CostsModule 4: Breakeven AnalysisModule 5: Cost AllocationModule 6: Time Value of MoneyModule 7: InflationModule 8: Sensitivity AnalysisModule 9: Integrating Budgeting With PerformancePart 3: The Budget ProcessModule 10: The Budget Process: An OverviewModule 11: The Budget DocumentModule 12: Determining the Baseline BudgetModule 13: Decision Packages: Cost EstimatesModule 14: Decision Packages: Budget JustificationsModule 15: Budget CutbacksModule 16: Legislative Budget ToolsPart 4: Capital Budgeting and Asset ManagementModule 17: Cost-Benefit AnalysisModule 18: Life Cycle CostingModule 19: Capitalization and DepreciationModule 20: Long-Term FinancingModule 21: Investment StrategiesPart 5: Budget ImplementationModule 22: Operating Plan and Variance AnalysisModule 23: Cash Management and Internal ControlsModule 24: Forecasting and Managing Cash FlowModule 25: Government and Nonprofit AccountingModule 26: Financial Statement AnalysisPart 6: Advanced ToolsModule 27: Calculating PayrollModule 28: Basic Forecasting ConceptsModule 29: Forecasting Intermediate ForecastingModule 30: Forecasting Advanced Intermediate Methods