Finance Fundamentals for Nonprofits, with Website: Building Capacity and Sustainability

Good book. I was surprised that so few nonprofits in Ann Arbor have this on the shelf.

If this had been written in a less stilted and stuffy style it would have been five stars. Otherwise and excellent resource of both information and ideas.

Well developed basic concepts on how to determine the health of a nonprofit organization. Good balance of how profit and nonprofit have similarities, but focuses on the nonprofits’ need to evaluate their fiscal health. This is not a simple read and act book, but one for the serious leadership team that wants to fully analyze the financial health of their organization. The basic concepts discussed are a good resource for donors or investors trying to understand the workings of a nonprofit organization. This book summarizes graduate level classes of information in one source.

I have been involved in nonprofit organizations for over 30 years, as a program officer, a chief executive, board member and consultant. This book achieves an unusually good balance between analytic concepts and practical application. I believe it would be valuable to any nonprofit board member as well as to foundation program officers who are charged with evaluating the economic health of organizations they are evaluating. Most nonprofit executives would benefit from the book as well. I wish this book had been available as a resource 20+ years ago.Bowman posits basic concepts to use in evaluating the financial health of organizations that are conceptually sound, but more importantly imminently practical and reflective of the reality of how nonprofits really work. He understand what nonprofits have in common with for-profit businesses, but what distinguishes them as well. This book can help business professionals better apply their experience on nonprofit boards, while appreciating the inherent differences between that experience and the realities of nonprofits.I highly recommend this book for anyone who wishes to improve their practical knowledge of how to assess and foster the economic health of nonprofit organizations.

This book introduces the reader to the basics, beginning the with language used by finance experts, and goes on to illustrate how decisions regarding financing an organization's activities affect its ability to carry out its objectives. In other words, the book offers an excellent balance between a) informing persons who may be new to the workings of nonprofit organizations; and b) engaging in a sophisticated dialogue with persons who have a considerable amount of experience running a nonprofit organization. The author makes clear that the measures of success of nonprofit organizational performance are just as concrete and measureable as the single most highly touted measure of for-profit performance, namely, profit. However, there must be full understanding and commitment to carrying out the nonprofit organization's goals on the part of administrators, the Board of Directors, and other interested parties. In the end, the discussion presented in this book is valuable not only because it is so practical, but because it is so thought provoking.

Having run two non-profits during my career, I find the information in this book to be invaluable. If I had had the book at the time I coud have avoided some mistakes that I made and it would have made my financial recotds easier to compile and easier to use. And very helpful to potential donors.Monroe Roth