Three tips for better tables in your documents

I’m sure you all write documents that involve tables of some kind, whether they are income and expenditure summaries, or analysis of some non-financial data. Here are three tips for presenting your tables so that they convey your message quickly and easily.

Use titles

Give your table a title that conveys the message the reader is supposed to receive from the data. Be explicit. Think like a newspaper editor trying to give a headline to the table. Instead of title that describes the data, such as “Quarter 3 income and expenditure summary”, give it a title that summarises the key message, such as “Budget surplus increased in quarter 3”.

Remove the borders

The default table style in Word puts a gridline around every cell of the table. Gridlines do not help the reader to understand the data. 

Once all the gridlines are removed you may feel that some cell borders would be useful. For example you might want the data in the total row to have top and bottom borders (although sometimes you can achieve the emphasis with bold and/or larger text). Similarly you might want to draw attention to a specific column and that could be done with text formatting or cell-shading rather than borders. Whatever technique you use for emphasis just use one throughout the report. It will be confusing for readers, and look terrible, if there is a mix of colours, bold and italics text and shaded cells.

Bonus tip: turn off the gridlines when you work on spreadsheets. You’ll find it easier to see the data and also get a preview of what the document would look like if you printed it.

Order data intentionally

It might be logical to have the rows in your table in alphanumeric order but that may make it harder for readers to see what you want them to see. Therefore order the data in a way that makes it easier for the reader. For example, if you want to draw attention to a large number (such as budget-actual variance) it might be better to order the rows in descending order of the variance.

Following these tips can change a table from this …

to this …

Do you want more help with your writing projects? I now offer one-to-one coaching on all aspects of writing for public sector accountants. Find out more here.

Accounting is about words as well as numbers

I guess the non-accountant’s view of accountants is that they are people who are good with numbers. Certainly there is a need to be numerate, but, to my mind, accounting is about words as well as numbers.

It is important to be able to produce a balance sheet that balances and to analyse the financial aspects of a project or investment. More than that, accountants need to be able to communicate what their balance sheets and analyses mean. Sometimes that is face-to-face communication, but more often it is done in writing.

Personally, I think accountants tend not be as good at writing as they are at counting. I suspect relatively few of them ever receive any training in writing. Instead, they learn on-the-job by copying the form and style of their predecessors. That is true for me, too. I can remember being a newly-qualified accountant and basing the letters and reports I wrote on the copies I found in the files (this being the time when files were made of paper and hung in order in a cabinet).

Subsequently, when I worked for a Big 4 firm, I attended a report-writing training session that was enormously useful, both for the audit role I had at the time, and ever since. It showed be how to order thoughts into a narrative that flows.

That was over 25 years ago. Since then I have made it my business to learn more about writing, in terms of content and also presentation. The way that words, tables and charts are formatted and laid out on a page can make it easier or harder for the reader to understand the message that the writer wants to communicate. 

Over the coming weeks I am going to share some tips to help accountants improve their written communication. Some tips will be about the content of the writing, some about the process and some about presentation. Watch this space!

Pay what you like for my procurement e-book

I wrote a short e-book to explain what is good practice in public procurement. I used hiring a consultant as a practical example because it is the sort of service that would be common right across the public sector, from ministries to hospitals, schools to emergency services. 

I think the book is worth at least five dollars. As a reader of this blog you can get the book as a pdf and pay what you like for it by clicking the button below.

All public managers should manage contracts

Choose a public service organisation — it could be where you work or your local government or a major hospital — and I will bet you that the number of human resources professionals is greater than the number of procurement professionals. Not only that, it will be far out of proportion with the split of the budget between employee and non-employee expenses. Why is that? 

An example

Let me use myself as an example. My CIPFA professional qualification course included general theories about management but it was mostly about accounting and trained me to be an accountant and not a manager. Therefore, after qualification, I went through the whole management development process as part of my professional development. I did management courses on recruitment, leading a team, equalities and diversity, disciplinary procedures and communication. I also did some skills-based training on things like report writing and presentations. What I didn’t do was any training in connection with procurement, contract management and negotiation skills. In fact, I don’t think those courses were available to me.

As it happened, almost immediately after I qualified I became involved in an outsourcing project and other outsourcing projects happened fairly regularly throughout the 20 or so years I worked as an public sector accountant. I learned, therefore, about procurement and contracts from the lawyers and procurement professionals I worked with. Whilst this is great on-the-job training, if I had been assigned to some different tasks and projects as a newly qualified accountant I never would have learned this stuff. I doubt, though, that it would have stopped me becoming a finance director because it was never on a person specification or asked about in an interview

Does it matter?

I think this matters. I think weak contract management skills is an under-recognised problem. 

The Open Contracting Partnership’s 2020 Annual Report estimates that public contracts amount to $13 trillion a year. That is something like 15% of the world’s total GDP and about half the total spending by governments. The proportion of government spending through public contracts will vary between countries and programme areas, but it is clear that procuring and managing contracts needs to be a significant component of the work done by public managers.

I think the senior managers in an organisation need to know how to manage contracts and suppliers given the proportion of spending that is not an employee spending. I find it very hard to believe that senior private sector managers get their jobs without having experience of managing contracts and suppliers. 

I think that if an organisation’s managers know nothing about contract management and supplier relationship management then they do not know the good from the bad, they do not know if their organisation is good or bad at managing its suppliers. That has to be an issue. 

What should be done?

Actually I don’t think the answer is for public sector organisations just to recruit a mass of qualified procurement professionals and hope that fixes things. What I think needs to happen is more subtle than that. I think public managers need their training and development to encompass the provision of public services through outsourced suppliers just as much as through direct employees. They should continue to have their training in recruitment and diversity and so on; but they should also have training in the parallel arts of procurement, contract management, and supplier relationship management. 

This applies to public finance professionals just as much as to public managers in general. Public finance professionals can play a positive role through the whole contract life-cycle. They can help in the procurement phase; they need to understand contracts in order to give advice during the delivery phase of a contract, and how it affects the budget. If things go wrong then public finance professionals can help with the exit from the contract and its replacement with an alternative supplier or even the direct provision by the public organisation.

None of these things will happen by accident. I think the professional accounting syllabuses need to incorporate procurement, contract management and negotiation as key skills for finance professionals. I think they could also encourage their students to adopt a more commercial approach in their thinking so they can understand suppliers better. 

More generally, a good starting point for any organisation would be to analyse how much of its activity is done by direct employees and how much by contractors and train its managers to match.

Money must flow

On the David McWilliams Podcast this week (episode 141) the subject was Bitcoin. More specifically it was about whether Bitcoin is money or not. David McWilliams explained his view that it’s not money because people hoard it rather than spend it. (The premise of the show is that David MacWilliams, a professional economist, explains current economic issues to his childhood friend, and the show’s producer, John. It is like listening in to two friends having a chat about the news in a bar or cafe. Check it out.)

This reminded me of something a tour guide said to my family and me when we were on holiday in India. It is something that has stuck with me for almost 15 years. Whenever we were at a tourist site, or passing by street hawkers, the guide, Ramesh, would say, “Money must flow.”

It’s a simple phrase but it resonated with me. If we spent our rupees on postcards, souvenirs, drinks, or whatever else then the money would flow into the community. In this way our tourism would help local people and the money we brought from England would circulate through the community.

I think this is what David McWilliams was getting at. I have choices about what to do with the money I earn. I could save it for the future and I might do that by converting the cash into bonds or gold or anything else I think will hold or increase its value. To that end I could buy some bitcoins or other digital assets like the non-fungible tokens that have appeared recently for works of art. 

Alternatively, I could spend the money. If I am going to spend the money, I can see why I might convert it into rupees, or dollars or euros or some other currency depending on where I plan to do the spending. Would anyone convert their money into bitcoin with the aim of spending the bitcoin? Well, perhaps criminals would, but would regular citizens do that? I think not.

Next time you are in a souk in north Africa, or outside a tourist attraction in India, or in a desert town in the Andes, remember that money must flow: spend your money with local people and local businesses. And give generous tips to your tour guides!

Email productivity hacks for accountants

My previous post explained some productivity hacks for writing. This post has three hacks to help you manage your email efficiently.

Close your mail app

Whatever app you use for your email keep it closed except for the specific times you actually want to read and reply to messages. Doing this cuts out all the notifications. 

The problem with an always-open email app is the risk that when you go to it you get sucked into reading and replying to messages when you have more important or more urgent thing to do.

I suggest you set yourself specific times when you will do your email, say 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes towards the end of the day.

If an email can be dealt with quickly, whether that is to delete it, archive it or write a short reply, do it straightaway. If an email needs a longer response, record it as a task in your todo list.

Filter your mail

Use the power of your email app to process some (most) of your messages for you. Some of the filter rules I use are:

• messages from people connected with a charity I volunteer for go into a separate folder, marked as read

• I assume that messages that are copied to me are not urgent and therefore if my name is not in the ‘To’ field then the message is marked as read and moved into a folder called “Copied to me”. I rarely look in that folder.

• any message with the word unsubscribe in it is marked as read and moved into a “Newsletter” folder. I look through them occasionally to see if there is anything I want to read.

You could do more. You could identify messages from certain people, such as your line manager, and add a colour to them so they stand out. You could send all messages with unsubscribe direct to the trash.

Each mail app will do filtering in a different way so you will need to research how to create the filtering rules for your particular app.

Search the archive

Aside from the folders above that I created as destinations for incoming messages I do not want in my Inbox but do not want to auto-archive, I have only one folder, the Archive. When I have dealt with a message I either delete it (my preference) or send it to Archive. This is also true of the messages filtered out by rules described above. 

I do not structure my folders. I rely on the mail applications search feature to find anything I need in the future. Even with 15,000 messages (I just checked), the search feature is fast and I can do it on my phone, a tablet or my computer. 

To search for a message means I need to know something about it (the sender, a keyword or phrase, a date) but that is all I need: I do not also need to know where I would have filed it. Sometimes I cannot find what I am looking for. The chances are that is because I have deleted it. I am confident that I would have fared no better if I had structured folders and at least I save the time spent creating and maintaining such folders.

Do you have any tips or hacks to share?

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