Customer Reviews

Accounting for Governmental and Nonprofit Entities with City of Smithville/Bingham premium content card

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If you are looking at this book, it is likely a required text for a course that you are taking. In that case, you may not have much choice as to whether you buy it or not, but if you do have a choice, you may want to avoid it.

This book is VERY poorly written and has very few diagrams to show interconnectedness of different accounts, funds, etc. There are occasional illustrations of typical statements, but most of them contain only "xxxxxxxx" where the account balance would be, so it is almost impossible to see how the different balances relate to one another on the statement, other than the order in which they typically fall. The writing is hard to follow and contains unnecessarily long and winding run-on sentences. Terms are thrown at the reader one after another, sentence after sentence, without pause. I've had to go back and re-read sentences many times just to try to parse what they are trying to say. I've shown the text to a friend, and she agreed that the writing is atrocious. Grammar, spelling and punctuation are ok, just the structure and length of sentences and the constant flow of terms with little clarification make the text very difficult to read.

I'm in my last semester of a bachelor's degree in accounting, and of the more than 30 textbooks that I've had to buy for different subjects, this is easily the worst.

The City of Smithville/Bingham premium content seems surprisingly well done compared to the text itself.

If you are required to use this text, I highly recommend getting it as soon as possible, and reading through the first chapter or two. If you have the same trouble with it that I've had, consider getting a supplementary book. You might check out "Governmental Accounting Made Easy" by Warren Ruppel. I've ordered that based on a review from another student who indicated that he/she found it useful as a supplement to a terrible text.

I highly recommend this book with the City of Bingham and City of Smithville CDs. The book is well-balanced and covers all types of government entities.

the book is good. but shipping is so slow, it won't be there till the last day.