Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector

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Chapter 1
Chapter 4

Have you found yourself creating your own budgeting exercises for your students? Are you frustrated by books that teach the theory of budgeting but offer students little opportunity to apply new skills and techniques? Then Budget Tools is for you.

Developed in classrooms, Budget Tools brings together scores of exercises that will take students through the process of public budgeting, from organizing data, through analysis and presentation. Using budgets from all levels of government, as well as from nonprofits, the authors have students work with real budgeting data to cover a range of topics and skills, such as historical analysis, forecasting, cost analysis, pension analysis, performance-based budgeting, debt structure and management, cash flow estimates and variance analysis, classifying and categorizing data, as well as memo writing and multi-year planning.

The accompanying CD includes datasets, examples, and spreadsheets to support the exercises in the book. Each exercise comes with solutions available to instructors who adopt the book for their courses. To download solutions to Budget Tools exercises, instructors must visit http://college.cqpress.com/instructors-resources/budgettools/ and register for a new account.

An Excel primer in the book’s final pages provides a quick and handy reference for students as they master basic skills and then move on to more advanced functions. The reference value that this book provides ensures that students will hold on to it long after they leave your classroom.