April 19, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
Financial Planning for Nonprofit Organizations
by Jody Blazek
This book seeks to help managers at nonprofit organizations make sense of the issues surrounding financial planning.
Jody Blazek, a partner at Blazek & Vetterling, an accounting company that specializes in advising tax-exempt groups, writes that nonprofit leaders could avert financial crises and use resources more efficiently if they understood the basic rules of financial planning.
Most important, Ms. Blazek says, nonprofit leaders must understand that they “can profit, or accumulate revenues in excess of expenditures, so long as such resources are devoted to improving the fashion in which the nonprofit accomplishes its exempt purposes.” She devotes the first chapter to dispelling the idea that nonprofit groups cannot make money, and explains the difference between what nonprofit and commercial entities do with the excess revenue they generate.
Chapter Two examines the roles of board members, staff, and volunteers. The goal is to define tasks and responsibilities and “to establish an adequate financial-management structure” and provide tools to keep it in place, Ms. Blazek writes. This chapter may be useful to financial managers who volunteer for nonprofit groups but do not have experience working with such organizations.
Subsequent chapters discuss accounting, budgeting, cash-flow planning, endowments, investments, restricted gifts, and special financial tools. Ms. Blazek also includes a chapter about obtaining and retaining tax-exempt status. The book contains model checklists and forms, and a glossary offers definitions of financial terms.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 1 Wiley Drive, Somerset, N.J. 08875; (800) 225-5945; fax (800) 597-3299; http://www.wiley.com; 275 pages; $34.95; I.S.B.N. 0-471-41285-6.
