Customer Reviews

Accounting for Governmental and Non-Profit Entities

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

This is a horrible book! Do not buy it. It is a student's nightmare. If you want to learn about government and nonprofit accounting, you're NOT going to gain much, if any, knowledge from this book. The authors do not use plain language, but talk back on themselves in sentences so that the flow of thought is interrupted and you must eliminate words in order to continue the flow, or switch thoughts entirely and then switch back-many times the subject of the sentence is completely lost and never finished. Many unnecessary comments, such as "need not be discussed here" and "as one would expect" plus excessive references to other chapters and Illustrations that are useless. Very limited on examples; I found it necessary to search the internet for the answers to the questions at the end of the chapters because the questions are not worded in relation to the information stated in the chapter, and the problems utilized account names never discussed in the book.

If you have a strong foundation in government or nonprofit accounting, then this book might be useful as a reference. For a student just learning about the systems, it is pretty worthless.

Professors, I beg that you use the feedback from students to develop a book from which we can actually learn these procedures. I never looked forward to an accounting class more than this one, and I'm so disappointed and feel like I've wasted my money. I know that the professors have the knowledge to teach the information in a way that we understand, so just put that into hardcopy and produce a proper book for students!

For an online class using this book, don't waste your time or money.

Please, no one buy this book... it will torture you like nothing else can. This book actually deserves -5 stars for how terribly written it is. The authors seem to repeat the same sentences in 5 or 6 different ways. It is poorly organized, it doesn't seem to have any real objective... a little bit of this here and a little bit of that there. Also, it is completely black and white with absolutely no pictures and very few illustrations... it will be of absolutely no help to a visual learner.

I needed this book for a governmental accounting course in college and when my bookstore wouldn't buy it back from me I wept tears. Luckily, my governmental accounting professor was really good otherwise there is no way I would have learned anything from this course. If you can possibly find some other book or maybe a newer edition would be better. The only somewhat helpful thing about this book was the City of Smithville project (CD-ROM) but even that had problems. It had a lot of technical difficulties and if you messed up an entry you pretty much had to start the project all over again. If you are doing City of Smithville, beware!

This book is poorly written. Unless you know Non-profit accounting, it is not written so that you will learn anything. I'm assuming professors use this book because of the Smithville case and for no other reason. Honestly, I do not feel the Smithville case goes along with the book very well. The authors should have exchanged notes a little more. Unless it is required or you are already working in non-profit accounting, I would not buy this book.

I do not like this book....it jumps and skips from chapter to chapter. Boring.....and I LOVE accounting.

The subject is tough, but I really think it could be explained better than it was. I thought some of the information was too wordy that you forgot what you were reading (topic) by the time you finished the sentence/paragraph. It jumped around a lot! Some of the wording seemed too vague, leaving the reader wondering if it meant THIS or it could mean THAT. I haven't read other books on this subject, but this one was a tough one to follow.

The material is somewhat outdated but most important; the writers do a poor job articulating fund accounting concepts straightforwardly. I will say, Chapter 2 is excellent and well delivered, but unfortunately, only an anomaly in this textbook.

This book is atrocious! About a 1/4 of the material is stuff like, "as we will discuss in the next chapter...we will cover more of this in chapter X...as you will see in the following chapter..." OMG! Horrible! Such a gargantuan waste of time. This is a tough topic to begin with, and these authors just compound the difficulty with their incoherent writing. My professor thought this book was good, and, now, I see why: he's just has scatter-brained and unorganized as this book, and the two of them waltz together in such a fine mess. Avoid! Protest this book if your teacher makes you use it! Geez!

It takes 3 CPAs also PHDs to write the lousiest text book I had ever used. It is poorly writen, it lacks of consistency in the explanations. I can't believe how much the word however is used in the same paragraph. If this was a english composition fianl project I would give F to the authors. Chapter after chapter I get more frustated about this book.

The text in this book is a very dry read. You have to really concentrate, or keep rereading over and over again to get through it and understand it. It makes it hard to concentrate when it keeps saying that what ever you just read will be discussed in later chapters. The project that is tied with the book is very user unfriendly. You can work for hours on it and save it, but there is no guarentee that you still won't lose all your work. The book I bought from the seller was in great shape but the content of the book isn't

This is a terrible, awful, horrendous book unless you already have a lot of accounting experience. For students it will prove to be frustrating and ineffective. If you're buying it it's probably because it's required for a class. Professors, find a better book!