Today, perhaps more than at any time in the past, managers and policy makers of public service organizations must have a working knowledge of financial management. This does not mean that all managers and policy makers of government, not-for-profit, and health care organizations must be financial managers. However, they cannot simply rely on others to be aware of the financial issues that involve the organization. All managers must be able to understand and make use of financial information.

This book provides a foundation in financial management to allow people to understand and use financial information. The intent of the book is not to make the reader into an accountant. Rather, its goal is to provide enough of the language and tools of financial management to make the reader conversant in the field. The primary goal is to provide the skills necessary to use financial information rather than the more technical skills needed to generate that information. However, one must have some sense of where numbers are coming from to be able to beneficially interpret and use those numbers. The book strives to provide that conceptual foundation.

One of the skills that all users of financial information must have is a strong financial vocabulary. The fields of accounting, finance, and public finance are heavily laden with jargon. Any accountant can bury a nonaccountant in debits and credits, journals, and reversing entries. A major emphasis of this book is on providing a working vocabulary for communication, so that the reader can develop the ability to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

In addition to vocabulary, this book describes a wide variety of methods, processes, and tools of accounting and finance. They are not described in sufficient detail for the reader to fire the treasurer and controller and take over their jobs. (How many of you really want to do that?) Instead, there is sufficient detail so that the reader can comfortably use the wide variety of financial reports that are generated in the typical organization. Also, the user of this book will have an awareness of the techniques available that can provide information to help improve decision making.

What are the typical types of organizations with which this text is concerned? The focus of the book is on the financial management of government, health, and not-for-profit organizations. Most financial books are oriented toward the for-profit corporate sector. Historically, they have had a heavy emphasis on manufacturing or financial markets. Recently, as the service sector of society has grown, there has been some shift in financial management toward service industries. However, government, health, and not-for-profit organizations are not typical service industries. The public sector that these organizations represent has developed its own financial management style and rules. Unusual public sector accounting approaches, such as fund accounting, heighten the challenge of studying financial management. As a result, it is vitally important to have a targeted book, such as this one.

Some users of this book will indeed want to go further in the field of financial management and gain a specialized knowledge. Those persons will need to be able to not only use but also generate financial information. Some of the more technical aspects needed by those individuals are contained in the appendices to a number of the chapters in the book.

It is the author's hope and belief that this book fills a void in a number of ways. First, a substantial effort was made to present all the material the target audience needs, while not including excess material that would obfuscate more than it would clarify. The balance of being sufficiently inclusive to adequately cover the topic and yet not so inclusive as to overwhelm the reader is a difficult one. It is one that the author has devoted substantial efforts to achieve.

Second, the book has been written with an awareness that there is substantial movement of managers among the three sectors covered in this book. For example, Stanrey Brezenoff moved from being executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to become the president of Maimonides Medical Center in New York. Dr. Jo Boufford, the past dean of New York University's Robert R Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, has not only worked in not-for-profit education but also as the president of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation; as the director of The King's Fund, a not-for-profit foundation; and as the principal deputy assistant secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Public service is a broad concept. Often people who enter public service find that their careers take unexpected twists and turns, moving from one part of the public sector to another. By providing information on government, health, and not-for-profit organizations, this book provides the user with the background needed for future opportunities in public service careers that may as yet be beyond the reader's imagination.

Third, this book presents the order of material in a revolutionary way. It is II believed that the order of presentation of material used in this text will substantially improve the learning process. Historically, accounting education has predominantly been targeted to those going into public accounting with the primary goal of becoming Certified Public Accountants. As such, the elements of accounting most necessary for public accountants are taught first. Financial accounting, an area primarily involving the generation of information to be reported to people outside of the organization, is generally taught before any of the elements of managerial accounting. However, most readers of this text will be managers, rather than auditors. Their needs are oriented toward getting and using financial information to make decisions and manage effectively. Most managers will be exposed to budgets long before they ever see their organization's audited financial statements. Therefore, the book reverses the normal order of most financial management texts, providing the foundation of managerial accounting before the discussion of financial accounting.

The order in which the material is presented in this book is unique yet logical. The process of developing a plan for the future, implementing the plan, controlling operations to keep to the plan, reporting results, analyzing results, and using that information to improve future plans is the normal flow of financial information within an organization. It is the way that most managers deal with financial information. In testing this book in the classroom, it has become apparent that this flow also helps readers get a better grasp of the entire financial management process.

The book is organized as follows. Chapter I provides an introduction and overview of financial management. The chapter also provides background information on the primary sources and uses of money in the public sector. The text then moves on to the organization's mission and the planning process in Chapters 2 through 5. A variety of budgeting techniques are discussed, as well as cost behavior. Managers must create a plan for the coming time period. Once made, plans must be implemented, with an effort to run the organization efficiently and to achieve its goals. Implementation and control issues are discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. These chapters focus on the management of short-term resources and obligations, and on issues of accountability and control. Managers need feedback to measure whether actual results are varying from the plan, so that midstream corrections can be implemented. This feedback, in the form of variance reports, is also discussed in Chapter 7. At year-end the organization needs to aggregate the events of the year and prepare a report of what has transpired. This report contains a set of financial statements, which are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. Special reporting concerns of health, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations are addressed in Chapters 10 and 11. Finally, managers must analyze these results to understand the organization's financial position and how well it has done. Financial statement analysis and financial condition analysis are covered in Chapters 12 and 13.

This new edition is accompanied by materials on the web. Both Instructor and Student Resources are available at: www.prenhall.com/finkler. If there are problems with the link, please contact me directly at steven.finkler@nyu.edu. Instructors should contact the publisher to get a password to have full access to this site. The on-line materials include:

• Student Resources
• Excel templates for assignment material
• Chapter related web-links
• Faculty Resources
• Solutions to assignment material
• Microsoft Excel solutions to assignment material
• A test bank
• A problem bank
• Updated and expanded power point class notes
• A detailed listing of all the changes in this Second Edition
• Updates and errata information

Many excellent suggestions were received from colleagues around the country for this second edition. I have tried to incorporate material related to as many of the suggestions as possible. I regret that due to space limitations, I was not able to include discussions related to all of the fine ideas that were received.

The new edition has more emphasis on the government sector, and also more emphasis on the use of Excel in solving the assignment material. In addition to the material on the web-site, major additions to the second edition include:

• Chapter 1: discussion of Public Finance and of NGOs, and a new appendix on fund-raising;
• Chapter 2: a governmental budgeting case in the chapter and a state budget case study assignment;
• Chapter 3: more governmental budgeting assignment problems emphasizing government line-item, responsibility center and functional budgets as well as the use of account codes for setting up a state department budget; also a new appendix on forecasting;
• Chapter 4: expansion of the activity based costing discussion and new coverage of outsourcing and the theory of constraints;
• Chapter 5: a stronger emphasis on the use of computer spreadsheets for calculating time value of money (TVM) problems, including an approach that will allow instructors to test students on their knowledge of the use of Excel for TVM without access to computers during exams. Also new coverage on bond call provisions, serial bonds, and NIC and TIC calculations for serial bonds; and expanded discussion of using calculators and spreadsheets for calculating annuities in advance;
• Chapter 6: a new case study assignment;
• Chapter 7: a discussion of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; simplified and expanded variance analysis discussion;
• Chapter 9: a chart of accounts discussion and a section on how to set up the books for an organization from scratch, including basic accounting software; also a new appendix discussing sources of revenues for governments;
• Chapter 10: a discussion of the growing pressures to tax not-for-profit organizations has been added; also a new appendix on taxation for not-for-profit organizations and a case study assignment on the unrelated business tax;
• Chapter 11: a discussion of budgetary accounting and updated material to incorporate GASB statements 35-40;
• Chapter 12: a not-for-profit organization financial statement analysis problem set;
• Chapter 13: a detailed listing of the elements of a comprehensive analysis of a city's financial condition, also additional ratios and financial indicators for assessment of financial condition, and a new appendix on bond ratings.

My biggest misgiving about the new edition is the length of Chapter 5. An already long chapter has become longer, and some thought was devoted to splitting it into two chapters. This had to be weighed against the comfort level of users of the text who like the current stucture. In the end, I decided to leave it as one chapter. However, I caution instructors to carefully consider the length of the chapter in planning their assignments.

This book was a major undertaking. The results were substantially improved by the valuable comments and suggestions made by my colleagues and students. I offer my thanks to my many colleagues at the Wagner School and around the country who reviewed the manuscript and made important suggestions, including Khaled Amin, Emily Crawford, Tim Ettenheim, Santa Falcone, Francesca Frosini, Patrice Iatarola, Dick Netzer, Pam Ouellette, Yousuf Rahman, Mark Robbins, Amy Schwartz, Bill Voorhees, and Robert Winthrop. I am grateful to Laura Hoguet who reviewed all of the assignment material for the second edition. Special thanks go to Dwight Denison, Marty Ives, Bernard Jump, Jr., Ken Kriz, Dean Mead, William Moore, Robert Purtell, Ross Rubenstein, and Leanna Stiefel, whose efforts went beyond the call of duty. I would also like to thank the publisher's reviewers, whose comments led to a number of improvements: First Edition-Tom Courtney, U.C. Berkeley and University of San Francisco; Stan Davis, St. Joseph's University (Phila., PA); Rev. Albert J. DiUlio, Santa Clara University (CA); William Zelman, University of North Carolina; Second Edition-Harwell Herring III, Utica College; Ken Milani, University of Notre Dame; and Laura Peck, Arizona State University. Ken Milani has been particularly generous in allowing me to include some of his material on the unrelated business tax.

Bernard Jump, Jr. of the Maxwell School gets the medal of valor for having used the earliest drafts of this book with his classes before even the most obvious and significant errors were removed. His tenacity in going through a number of different drafts of the book and his conceptual and technical comments throughout the process have been invaluable.

My thanks also go to Dwight Denison, Robert Purtell, Ed Roche and Louis Stewart for specific valuable contributions to the book. Dwight Denison authored a number of homework problems that appear at the end of chapters throughout the book, as well as the Ponderosa case study at the end of Chapter 13. Robert Purtell prepared the first version of most of the power point class notes as well as several case studies that are used in the text. All four worked on the examinations that now appear in the test bank. Special thanks to Khaled Amin for compiling the test bank.

I would like to thank the entire Prentice Hall team for their remarkable job in getting this book to the reader. I thank my editors, PJ Boardman and Bill Larkin for overseeing the entire project. Production Editor Suzanne Grappi managed the production process and Heather Meledin and her team at Progressive Publishing Alternatives did a fantastic job copyediting and paging the manuscript. Kerri Tomasso and Caroline Kasterine were responsible for overseeing the website materials for the book. Beth Toland, Marketifig Manager, is the one who made sure you found out about this book. I would also like to thank Charles Morris, Permissions Coordinator, and Bruce Kenselaar, who designed the cover.