Customer Reviews

Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I used this textbook the last time I taught GovernmentalAccounting. The book is an excellent introduction to state and local government accounting and reporting, federal government accounting, not-for-profit organizations (colleges, universities, health care organizations, etc.), and public sector auditing. The 20 chapters have numerous illustrations of financial statements and flow charts relating each of the different fund types within specific organizations. The illustrations are both academic (i.e., written by the authors) and actual (e.g., City of Des Moines, Iowa). Where appropriate, there are chapter glossaries. Governmental accounting is unlike corporate accounting, in that both actual and budgetary amounts are shown in the financial statements provided to the external reader. The authors explain this clearly. The authors use t-accounts to show the interrelationship of the accounts and the flow of funds between the accounts. There also useful references to the Governmental Accounting Standards Board...

The previous comment shows a typical response from an undergraduate, similar to what I have encountered on teaching evaluations in my different classes. A number of students believe that a course should be "interesting." That is, more entertaining. (See Peter Sacks's book, _Generation X Goes to College_.) If someone doesn't find governmental accounting interesting, don't major in accounting. It is not a requirement for any other undergraduate major at any school I know; indeed, few schools even teach the course. People should major in areas that they find interesting.

On the other hand, anyone who wants to understand the construction and analysis of statements which present the operations and financial position of government and non-profit entities will benefit from a careful reading of this book. I have used it for directed readings (only one student reading on his or her own) successfully for motivated graduate students.

The previous commentator faults the book for lack of color. For this material, color adds almost nothing to comprehension, slightly to clarity and greatly to the cost. The book already costs $100, because the governmental accounting textbook market, with numerous competitors in it, is only 3,000-4,000 classroom adoptions per year (compared with over 50,000 a year for Principles of Accounting).

My experience as an author suggests that adding color would raise the cost of the book to at least $140. Would the previous reviewer be willing to spend the money in the hopes it would be more interesting?

I recommend this book.

This book is disorganized, disjointed and has a poor index. There are zero online supplemental resources for this book. During my class, I used supplemental resources for other governmental accounting books, such as, McGraw Hill.

Like others have said, this book is awful. Plain and simple. Unorganized, laughable at best index, terrible examples, and the list goes on and on. Wouldn't even get it if it was a required text for class, unless of course you have assigned homework problems from the book. The authors should be ashamed of themselves.

This textbook does not cause me any frustration due to its inherent lack of color or boring tedious material. As the professor who wrote a review above said, those people should have majored in something that is interesting to them (although, accounting, by definition, can definitely become boring and tedious at times). It is up to the student to instead decide whether working through the material is worth the reward (i.e. an Accounting degree) and if it is what they want to do as a career afterward... anyways, on to the book review:

This book gives me problems in one **major** area, which is that it is simply edited poorly. By this I mean that it is not presented logically, instead in a jumbled-together fashion that makes it difficult to read.

One big issue is that the chapters are not arranged in a logical order to where chapter 1 builds to chapter 2, and so on. We skipped chapters 2-4 and came back to them so we would be able to understand what the book was talking about...

Another problem with this book's organization is its use of references: it tells the reader, within the paragraph, to "refer to examples 1-4, 1-5, and 1-6" to gain further insight on a subject. This sort of reference would be fine, except that the examples it refers to are usually on different pages, often 7-10 pages apart from one another. Any insight that might have been gained from loking up the examples is lost in the process of flipping pages back and forth, over and over.

In conclusion, the main problem with this textbook is the shoddy job of editing that was done. This is partly due to the fact that subsequent revisions chose to keep certain parts, add others, and delete some more, while the author's original intent was most likely to give the student an encompassing view of the subject through the detail and order of the content.

Prentice Hall is notorious for putting out textbooks just like this one. I remember teaching myself Tax due to many of these same reasons, and it too was published by Prentice Hall. Many of their texts are highly technical and do contain good information, but the poor organization of the book itself just plain ruins it. It can be compared to trying to read a newspaper article without the intro or conclusion paragraphs. Sometimes you get lost trying to figure it all out on your own.

In short, try to gain as much knowledge as you can from your instructor in class, because it won't help you one bit to try to read this book. Don't take notes in class, just listen to what the professor says and copy down the problems in class for study later on.

While it is possible to scrape by in class by spending hours on end trying to read *&* comprehend this book, one should not have to. That is not the purpose of education. If this book was written and edited like it should have been, students should be able to open up the chapter and find an easy reference to concepts that they may not understand completely. This book does not provide such references.

I am not sure why the other reviewers had problems with this book. I actually found it to be quite easy to read and understandble in its explanations of terminology. I work for a software company which sells a budgeting tool. Since realigning over to our public sector division, I decided to buy this book in order to hone my governmental accounting skills. My accounting degree certainly helped and this books assumes a minimal set of accounting skills. The problems were quite helpful in reinforcing the concepts.

I am currently a Masters level student who is taking a Governmental Accounting course. I have found this text to be somewhat confusing. The chapters and the information are very detailed however, the study questions introduce new terms and are hard to follow. This makes for a complicated and frustrating process for anyone who has not had a previous accounting course. I understand that there are not many books out there on this topic. However, a study guide or even the assistance of a glossary and some consistency in phrasing questions to be similar to the text would help. If I can't understand what the question is asking how am I to know if I understand what I thought I just read. The lack of pictures and graphics does not bother me and the blue ink while hard to get used to is easier on my eyes. The Powerpoint presentations were also helpful.

I got my book in time. Book was in good condition. I am happy with seller. Would love to do business with seller in future

In general, this is the worst accounting book I have EVER been forced to decipher (didn't like our cost accounting book either). At my school, and probably elsewhere, ,everybody seems to think Acct 405 (Financial Acct 2) is the "hard" course, but Fin Acct 2, at least to me, has NOTHING on trying to learn governmental accounting from using this awful book.

I just finished a Governmental Accounting class that used this textbook. It is by far the worst book I have had in 4 years of college. The examples are horrible. There is no color. Most accounting authors try to make the material interesting. This is a book that will turn potential accounting majors away from the field.

I am also a Master level student. I read this book and it is a great shame to the profession and a great insult to the public at large, let alone students who have to pay dearly for this textbook with a low rate of return. When discussing Accounting, Ethics should be close at heart to these experts. Unfortunately, it shows none here whatsoever. In general, I find it is a great disturbance for these self-pronounced" experts in Accounting to write such a low quality textbook with a great violation of the technical writing 's ethical category, ie, repetitive, clustered, hard to understand, contradictory sometimes; but most of all the English language used in certain introductory chapters, ie, chapters one and two, full of grammatical errors, punctuations, paragraphs and sentences are ambiguous, vague, and copied directly from the code law book. etc... We have zillions law in the USA, one more to make these authors accountable for their writings and so-called expertise in the field would NOT hurt too much. We, the students are YOUR customers, not the Professors who force your book in our throats! Be ethical, be responsible so we can avoid FRAUD, UNETHICAL practices in the real world. After all, we learn from your textbook for God's sake. Treat us with decency, and kindness, and the world shall be better if not in this generation. And remember when you die, you do not take the earthly paper of award or recognition with you. Leave your good name with a good morality instead. In the commercial world of Capitalism, the customers thrive the demand and supply. Think about it....