To be good at writing you must read a lot

A common piece of advice for aspiring creative writers is to read as much as you can.

I think we can apply that to accountants who want to improve their writing skills.

They should read finance reports and documents written by others, inside and outside their organisation, but I would add a qualification ...

When reading finance reports do it with a sense of curiosity. If you read something that seems to be very effective, ask yourself how it differs from your work. Is the use of language or structure different? Or is the layout of the words and figures done in a way that is especially clear? Or perhaps there has been good use made of graphical features like colours and fonts?

By the same token, I suggest you do the same when you read something that is not very effective. Indeed, perhaps you should be just as keen to learn from what does not work as from what works.

I am always on the lookout for examples of good finance reporting writing so if you have any please post a link in the comments below.

Writing about writing about finance

I’m going to pivot. I’ve been a public finance accountant for 30 years and up to now I’ve written posts relating to public financial management. Actually, what I am really interested in is writing. So from now on…

I am going to post tips, stories and resources about writing with an emphasis on how they can be used by accountants and finance professionals to improve their work outputs.

One assumes that all accountants are numerate but how many of them have ever received training in writing? And yet, accountants are nothing without words. Their role is to summarise and analyse financial transactions in ways that generate meaningful information that they then have to communicate to an audience, whether that be internally to managers or externally to investors, auditors and the general public.

I think there is scope for many accountants to improve their written output: not just long-form reports but also emails, letters and slide decks. Some of the improvement is literally about the words they use and the order they assemble them but they can also improve the way they set out data in tables and charts and the layout of all that on the page or screen.

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Add a touch of Hemingway to your next finance report

What did the authors Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway have in common? Well, aside from being American, they all had a writing style that was direct; they did not waste words.

Sometimes I like to read a book with a lyrical style but for the most part I prefer the direct style of Chandler and co.

When it comes to writing financial reports I encourage you to adopt a plain, direct style. If you do not then, at best, your reports will be over-written and, at worst, you will obfuscate the message you are trying to communicate. (I suppose I should, on that basis, permit over-writing if your intention is to obfuscate!)

It is easy to fall into the trap of over-writing. When I first qualified as an accountant I wrote letters that included phrases like “I would be grateful to receive your remittance at your earliest convenience.” Now I would write, “please pay promptly,” or, better, replace promptly by a deadline date. This is much easier to understand, and takes fewer words, too.

None of us are in the league of Nobel prize-winning authors but we can improve through practice. When we write something of any length we can always read over it with a view to simplify it. These days we can also use technology to help us. Recently I came across a web service called Hemingway. All you need to do is paste the text you have written into Hemingway and it will assess the reading age needed to understand it and highlight sentences that are long and complicated, and words that can be replaced by simpler words.

If you’re interested, the first draft of this post had a reading age of Grade 10, 5 of its 17 sentences were hard to read, and 3 sentences were very hard to read. Using the app I fixed four of those problem sentences and got down to Grade 8.

If you want some help to improve your writing it is worth checking out Hemingwayapp.com. As well as the free web version, you can pay for a desktop version for Windows or macOS.

3 quick tips for formatting spreadsheets

Good design helps people to use products and this applies to spreadsheets and financial models as much as it does to smartphones and websites. When you create a spreadsheet you should consider how it is formatted as part of its overall design. I have made a short video with three tips for formatting your spreadsheets to ensure they are useable.

The video is part of an online course, Financial Modelling in the Public Sector, which you can find here.

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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.