Help the next generation of women reach their potential

In South Sudan most girls drop out of school early, before they achieve any formal qualifications. In fact, teenage girls are more likely to die in childbirth than complete their secondary education.

At the beginning of February the government of South Sudan published the results of the nationwide primary school leaving certificate which were taken sat at the end of November 2018.

The top scorer in the 2018 examinations was a girl from a small village in the south west of the country. She was joined in the national top ten by five of her classmates. That’s 6 out of the top ten scorers in the country were girls from the same small school: Ibba Girls Boarding School. This is a school that opened in 2014 with 40 girls in a single class and 2018 was the first year that its girls were old enough to sit the leaving certificate. It is a remarkable achievement.

The six girls I have mentioned, and the other 29 girls in their class, have now begun the first of the four years that will make up their secondary education.

The school is not only a benefit to the girl pupils. The girls take what they learn home with them to share with their siblings and even their parents. And the school provides employment, with salaries that are reliably paid each month, to more than thirty people. It has a very positive impact on the local community. The national Ministry of Education has noticed this and wants more schools like IGBS across the country.

Ibba Girls Boarding School shows what can be achieved by girls from the poorest of backgrounds if only they have the chance. But the local community cannot afford to run the school — nor can the state education ministry — so the girls rely on funding from the Friends of Ibba Girls School, a British charity of which I am the treasurer (it’s one of the ways I practise what I teach). Here’s a 2-minute video about the school.

If you’ve read this far you won’t be surprised by me asking you to consider supporting the school with a monthly donation. You can find out more about the school, and make a one-off or recurring donation, at our website. If you happen to be involved with an institution that makes grants to a charity like Friends of Ibba Girls School, or know someone who is looking to make a major donation to a good cause, then please email me and we can have a conversation about it.

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.

If you want more of these tips about writing and making presentations then join my mailing list.

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.

Free online course: 5 questions to ask about your budget

If you're in a government department, a local council, a police force, NHS trust or one of many other public sector organisations (but not all) in the UK then you'll know this is budget time. The new financial year starts in April and before then budgets need to be constructed, debated and approved.

Budgets are critically important in public bodies because they demonstrate the priorities and authorise managers to spend public money.

Last year I created a free mini-course based on a presentation I gave to some councillors about the nature of public budgets and the questions they should ask about their budget before they approve it. It's a short course (under half an hour) and it's free. If you're a politician or budget manager in a public body you can access the course here. Did I say it's free? It also comes with a handy one-page summary of the questions. Sign up for it today.

International public financial management — my new book

My new book, International Public Financial Management: Essentials of Public Sector Accounting to give it its full title, was published at the very end of December.

The book is part of a project with CIPFA who wanted a book to complement their IPFM qualifications. This is partly to be a a resource for students that seeks to capture the essential elements of the modules they study, and reflects good practice as put forward by CIPFA in its examination syllabuses. It is also partly aimed at people who are not CIPFA students but are practitioners in the public sector who want a concise book covering the essentials of public financial management.

If you want a copy of the book this is the official page on the publisher’s website. You can also buy if from Amazon, of course.