Financial Goal Setting

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should:

• Recognize the key components of a public organization's budget timeline/calendar and formal/legal budget process.
• Know the typical sources of conflict and compromise in the budgeting process.
• Recognize the many different ways that we define "budget balance" and implications of those various definitions.
• Recognize that budgets ensure fiscal accountability, but do not guarantee financial solvency
• Know the basic strategies managers use to expand their budget authority or respond to potential cuts.
• Acknowledge the effectiveness of "doing nothing" as a budget-cutting strategy.
• Recognize when and why an organization's budget for a service might be quite different from what that service costs.