Effective Financial Planning for Library and Information Services (2nd ed.)

Citation

Calvert, P. (2003), "Effective Financial Planning for Library and Information Services (2nd ed.)", The Electronic Library, Vol. 21 No. 6, pp. 614-615. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470310509207

This is a short practical guide to the key library management activity of financial planning. It covers the whole field of budgeting: planning, budget preparation, development, presentation, and managing expenditure. Six types of budget are described: line‐item (still by far the most common), formula, programme, performance, the planning programme budgeting system, and zero‐based budgeting. Some of these have been briefly popular, such as ZBB, and currently programme (or functional) budgeting is popular, but in most cases they all contain some element of line budgeting. This whole section is kept relatively simple to make it useful to someone entirely new to budgeting, and to students studying financial management. The increasingly important activity of costing receives rather too little attention in the short third chapter, though some simple formulae for calculating unit costs are included. There is a short, but useful section on reporting that will be of use to solo managers, LIS students, and those recently promoted to the level of financial reporting. There is a description of accounting cycles included as a guide, though all managers will naturally have to work within the timetables set by their own organisations.

The second half of the book covers a mixture of topics, such as access against purchase (some deal done for most managers). This is the major addition to the second edition, in addition to some extra lines for “access items” added to examples of budgets throughout the book. The first edition of this guide was popular, so there is no reason to suppose the second edition won't do equally as well. It has a simple index and a fairly lengthy bibliography, which is indicative of its place as a starting point for all those new to this aspect of management. The author has kept the content very simple and probably had to work within a tight page limit set by the publisher. The spreadsheet on page 96 is quite helpful, but I needed a magnifying glass to read it!