Productivity hacks for accountants

This is the first of what may become a series of posts about productivity.

There are countless podcasts, articles, and blogs about productivity. I’m a listener/reader of some and I don’t think I have ever come across one specifically made or written with accountants in mind. 

Allow me to step into that gap with (my first) three tips that I think can be adopted by accountants regardless of the technology they are given to use by their organisation.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Navigating documents and spreadsheets is quicker using the arrow keys than using a mouse or trackpad. There are shortcuts for most of the popular actions such as copy (Cmd/Ctrl + C), paste (Cmd/Ctrl + V), save (Cmd/Ctrl + S), and open (Cmd/Ctrl + O). In Word the space bar combined with arrow keys highlights text faster than you can drag a mouse

You can see the shortcuts next to the items in the menus in apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You could also do a web search for lists of shortcuts 

Don’t try to learn every shortcut in one go; instead, learn one or two and when they become second nature learn another couple.

Use text expansion

There must be some phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs that you use over and again. This could be contact info like your email address and phone number. It could be a standard reply to email requests. Whenever you notice you are writing something you have written before, or you find yourself looking for a previous document to copy the text for re-use, there is a candidate for text expansion.

Text expansion is a service where you link a short trigger phrase to a longer one so that when you type the trigger phrase it is replaced by the longer phrase. For example, when I type ‘socf’ it is replaced by statement of cash flows and ‘xbs’ is replaced by balance sheet. (I use x as the first letter for lots of my triggers because few real words begin with an x and it is on the main keyboard so takes fewer taps on a phone or tablet.)

I also use text expansion for auto-correction of words. For example, when I type ‘cipfa’ it will automatically be capitalised to CIPFA.

There are many text expansion apps available and which suits you depends in part on the device you have and how much you are willing to pay to save time. Textexpander is the one I have. It works across platforms and can be synced so that the same trigger shortcuts are available on all your devices. 

Bonus tip

If you use an Apple computer, an iPhone, or iPad then you can do you text expansion for free because Apple has built it into the operating systems. Go to the Keyboard section of settings to set it up. 

Use your voice

When I was a finance director in the early 2000s I had a voice recorder and a personal assistant, Lynn. I could, and did, talk into my voice recorder when walking to and from the office and give the tapes to Lynn to turn into letters, emails, reports, etc. Lynn would sometimes have time to type things for other members of staff but most of the staff, most of the time, had to write their own documents.

These days we can all dictate our writing using just a smartphone and I strongly recommend that you do. I am sure you can speak faster than you can type. Voice recognition software has improved over the years and it makes fewer mistakes out-of-the-box and the more you use it the better it gets as it learns the words you use.

I suggest next time you have a document to write that is more than 2 or 3 paragraphs long you try dictating the first draft on your phone. Email that document to your work account so that you can put the words into the official template and then finish the document. I think you could save a stack of time and effort.

Let me know your productivity tips and perhaps I will include them in a future post.

Nice and sleazy does it

There’s a lot in the media at the moment about cronyism and the lack of transparency about the links between the British government and businesses. In the UK the media tend to use the term “sleaze” rather than “corruption”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines sleaze as immoral, sordid, or corrupt behaviour and the media tends not to make it clear which adjective applies. They make it seem like the things that are going on are distasteful rather than wrong.

Transparency International define corruption as “the abuse of power for private gain.” Many of the things being reported here in the UK seem to me to fall into that definition. Taking money from someone to refurbish your dwelling is a corrupt act whether you’re a local councillor on the planning committee or living in Downing Street. So is helping your friends to obtain government contracts with the (deniable-until-it-happens) expectation that the favour will be repaid in years to come with a non-executive directorship.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the UK is riddled with corruption. In Santiago, Chile a few years ago I met a man who said to me, “It’s OK, you can trust the police here. You won’t have to bribe them.” This is something that had never occurred to me. The fictitious Central Police in the BBC’s Line of Duty seems overrun with corrupt officers, but in real life, people in Britain don’t need to pay police officers to get their help. Nor do they need to pay “incentives” to lodge official papers or do any other business.

For this reason, the UK is perceived as one of the least corrupt countries. In the 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index it was ranked as 11th with a score of 77 (out of a maximum of 100). In 2017 the UK was at its peak: 8th in the world with a score of 82 and is steadily falling from this. And back in 2010 the UK was 20th with a score of 73?

The 2010 score in part reflects the scandal about MPs’ expenses claims that came to light in 2009. I imagine the UK’s CPI score will fall again in the 2021 edition because of the current stories. Will it fall lower than the 2010 score. I think it could do unless something is done to fix what is wrong at the heart of the British government.

If you want to learn more about the CPI, you can see the summary of the results for 2020 here and watch the 2-minute explainer video here.

Procurement the right way

Procuring goods, works and services is integral to public service delivery. Even where public services are delivered by an organisation’s own staff they will almost always need some equipment or services, such as a computer or phone, an office with a desk and chair, a mode of transport and so on. 

All of these goods and services have to be procured, and in the public sector there is an expectation that what is procured is good value for money. One way of evaluating whether a purchase is good value for money is to use the 5 rights of procurement. This means, were the goods, works or services procured:

- of the right quality

- at the right quantity

- delivered to the right place

- at the right time 

- and for the right price?

The 5 rights apply as much to private sector business as it does to the public sector. I don’t really care how people in business do things (though business owners would care) but I do care about how public money is spent. When it comes to government spending, therefore, I think we need to add a sixth right: the right way.

The right way is about openness, transparency, fairness, integrity and accountability. It’s not about awarding contracts to friends or family members without competition, or giving an advantage to suppliers who know the phone numbers of ministers, or doing favours in return, or expecting a seat on the board at some future date.

Although I have said a sixth right is needed, I think it should be seen as the first one. Public procurements have to be done the right way in order to get the right goods or services at the right price, etc.

I know the last year has been unusual but that is an argument to follow proper processes, not throw them away. Here in the UK the Comptroller and Auditor General has written “Uncompetitive procurement practices must not be allowed to become a new norm.” I agree with him.

If you want to know something about the right way to do public procurement you could download my free e-book or register for my Introduction to Public Financial Management course.

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.

Online public financial management course now available

In February, I travelled to Dubai to deliver a week-long course for my friends at ABMC International in Kenya. The course was their Certified Public Finance Management Accountant course. This is a course aimed at people working in public financial management roles and it covers a range of topics including accounting, procurement, contract management, revenue collection and audit.

I travelled back to the UK just as it was becoming clear across Europe that governments were going to be locking down their economies for a while. This would clearly negatively affect the face-to-face delivery of training but it offered an opportunity for online learning. Universities were able to take their teaching online very quickly and I suggested to ABMC that perhaps I could create an online version of the public finance course I had just taught in Dubai. They were very happy for us to work together on that.

I must confess it took longer to make videos of the lecture material than I expected, in part because of my perfectionism. The course was created, tested and live by July 2020. If you are interested in the course you can find it here.

The course has ten modules, each with a check-your-learning quiz at the end. There is free access to the eight lectures in Module 1, the introduction to public financial management, so that you can check it out before buying access to the whole of the course. Just scroll down the landing page to the curriculum section and click the Preview buttons.

The difference between public and private sector financial management

I have long thought that managing public money is an art rather than a science. I also happen to think that managing public money is harder to do than managing the finances of a private business. That is not to say that private sector financial management is not a complicated, technical thing to do. What I mean is that the complications and technicalities in the public sector are broader and more nuanced.

Whilst creating a new online course with my friends ABMC International, I made a video explaining my reasons for taking the view that public financial management is harder than private financial management. You can watch it here. Whilst you’re there take a moment to subscribe to my YouTube channel because I will post more free videos in the future.