Let me be your guide to public financial management

I have written and produced a new online course. It’s called Introduction to Public Financial Management and is aimed at anyone working in government or public sector organisations.

Completing the course will enable you to:

• Understand the public finance management cycle.

• Manage a budget for a project, service or organisation.

• Understand the sources of funding available to governments and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

• Understand the importance of creating value for money and how to measure it.

• Know when it makes sense to involve a partner in the delivery of a project or service, and how to get the best from the partner.

• Know how to evaluate investments and projects.

I created the course in partnership with FreeBalance, the government software company. They have been developing a portal for online learning — the FreeBalance Academy — and invited me to contribute my own courses to it. I took the opportunity to make an online version of the course I teach at the University of Nottingham. 

The course has ten units, each aligned with a chapter of my book. Unlike a book, this course is interactive. There are more than 60 videos and a whole host of other resources including downloadable documents and quizzes to test your learning. And if you pass the final assessment at the end there is a certificate of completion.

Find out more, and register, by clicking the button below.

Financial modelling course for public sector accountants

One of my goals for 2019 is to get my online school up and running and today I have published my first proper course. It’s a short course, taught mostly using videos, about the standards and principles that underpin good financial models. By adopting these principles you will make fewer errors in your spreadsheets and it will be easier for you, and others, to modify or revise the model after it is built. And because you have skills that are seldom taught to accountants you will stand out from the crowd.

The course fee is £49 but you can get 25% off From today until until 28 February 2019 by using the coupon code LAUNCH25. Get the course here.

This course is the first of five that I have planned under the umbrella of Skills for (Public Sector) Accountants. All five of the courses are about areas of work that are important to accountants but which are not taught in a professional accounting qualification. Following on from the financial modelling course will be courses about report writing, making presentations, managing suppliers and measuring value for money.

The remaining four courses in the bundle will be published over the first few months of 2019. If you want to get each course as it is published and save yourself more than half the price you can buy the whole bundle of five courses now and, until the end of February 2019, using the coupon code LAUNCH25 will get you 25% off the early bird price of £99.

New Year, New Direction, New Course

January 1st is an arbitrary day to be the first day of the year. As a former public servant in the UK I would also see 1 April as the first day of the financial year. Several years ago I wrote a post explaining why the UK tax year starts on 6 April (which itself refers to the first day of the year traditionally being 25th March, “Conception Day”). Anyway, 1 January is the conventional start of the year in terms of the change from 2018 to 2019 (CE, not AD) and the extended break I had over the Christmas and new year period has given me a chance to think about this blog.

Hitherto I have regarded this blog as something aimed at anyone working in government or public sector organisations who is responsible for managing money. This includes people working in finance/accounting departments but also all the managers and frontline staff with budget responsibilities, the politicians and others who direct the organisations, and even volunteers. My reason for this was, I think, an attempt to have the broadest impact. To some extent it also reflected my mindset in writing my first book, Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector, which was conceived to be a book that librarians, social workers, police officers and nurses would find useful.

Over the last 9 months or so I have been developing online training courses based on my books and my experience of real-life teaching. I confess at times to have struggled to know who my target audience is and what, therefore, they would need from the courses. This has been a tension between the fact that I’m an accountant and I best understand the skills and needs of accountants and my wish for my courses to appeal to the librarians, etc. My recent reflections have resulted in a decision, for the next year at least, to focus my courses, and this blog, on skills and productivity tips for accountants working in public sector organisations, whether in the UK or elsewhere. This means parking, for now, the major finance for non-financial managers course I was working on and focusing on a programme of shorter courses: Essential Skills for Public Sector Accountants. 

I have five courses planned for the first half of 2019:

• Financial modelling in the public sector

• Presentation skills for public sector accountants 

• Writing for public sector accountants

• Procurement skills for public sector accountants 

• Measuring value in the public sector

The titles of these courses may change if/when I think of titles that are better in marketing terms. Whatever the titles ultimately are I think the content will be unique. I know there are courses about financial modelling but I do not think anyone has created on specifically about the kinds of spreadsheet models used in public sector organisations. And I am almost sure that no-one has ever targeted presentation skills at accountants. This course, by the way, is about how to communicate financial messages and information and not about helping introverts to speak up. (I’m in the 99th percentile of the scale of introversion—really, I am—and yet I can and do stand in front of audiences and talk to them. Introversion is not the same thing as shyness.)

What does this all mean for this blog? Well, first I hope to post here more frequently than I’ve managed over the last few years. Second those posts will be related to the content of the courses I’m developing so they are more likely to be practical tips than news items.

Creating an online course about managing public money

For several years I have been thinking about doing less consulting work and making a living from selling products instead. The beauty of selling products is that it is unconstrained. When I work as a consultant, or as a teacher, I can generally only be paid for the time spent on the project. I have tried, and sometimes I succeed, in selling my service at a fixed fee, which gives me an incentive to work faster rather than slower, but many of my clients seem to see this approach as too risky. Essentially, that puts a limit on what I can earn because I can only sell my time once. Selling products, on the other hand, does not have that limit: the limit is the demand for the product at the price being charged.

As I said, I’ve had that on my mind for a few years and this year I decided to do something about it. The products I want to sell are online courses, books, e-books and coaching that are focused on various aspects of managing public money. Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about my online school and the free mini-course I created (Five Questions To Ask About Your Budget).

This week I made a start on creating my first paid-for course. It is a course aimed at anyone working in the public sector who wants to know more about the big picture of financial management. It is concerned with explaining the differences in financial management between the public and private sector, how public bodies are funded, and the governance arrangements that tend to apply to public workers. It also explains the concept of value for money, something which is vitally important to organisations that do not sell their products and services in a free market.

I thought it might be interesting to write a series of blog posts over the next few weeks that show how the course was created. Step 1 has been sketching out the content in the form of a mind map.

I created the mind map in an application called Mindnode. One of its nice features is the ability to switch from a map view to an outline view. Another feature is the ability to export the mind map into OPML format, which can then be opened by an outliner app or in rich text format (RTF) to be opened in a word processor like Word or Pages. 

The next stage of the process is to expand the headings and notes in the mind map into a set of steps. Each of the main branches in the mind map will be a topic within the course. Each topic will be broken into a set of lessons that will take less than 10 minutes each to complete. The plan also has to set out how each lesson will be taught (whether the lesson will be text, video, slide presentation, etc) and what downloadable material is needed to support it.

If you are interested in the course then sign up to my list so that you don’t miss its launch.