Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Craig D. Shoulders (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Appropriate for undergraduate Accounting courses, such as Governmental Accounting, Public Sector accounting, Government and Nonprofit Accounting, and Fund Accounting. Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting, Sixth Edition provides a better balance between theory and practice than other texts, with the most up-to-date coverage. It provides students with a thorough basis for understanding the logic for and nature of all of the funds and account groups of a government, with a unique approach that enables students to grasp the entire accounting and reporting framework for a government before focusing on specific individual fund types and account groups.

From the Publisher

THE most comprehensive text in the field, this introduction to accounting and financial reporting for state and local governments and nonprofit organizations offers an excellent balance between theory and practice. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 858 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 6 edition (October 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132726750
• ISBN-13: 978-0132726757
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,322,355 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent textbook, August 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting (6th Edition) (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Poorly Wrriten Government Accounting Textbook, June 29, 2009

By	Trish - See all my reviews

This review is from: Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting: Theory and Practice (9th Edition) (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Please *read* this review, May 16, 2005

By	C. Goodell "memphis student" (TN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Governmental and Nonprofit Accounting (Hardcover)

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.