I help accountants and auditors turn insights into impact by improving their business writing.
People spend average of 26 seconds reading a piece of content. That means you’ve got about 120 words to get your message across and/or make someone decide to read more. This applies to emails, memos, reports, slack messages, everything you write at work. It’s demoralising that despite the effort you put into a major report the reader will skim it. Most of your words won’t be read. Embrace that.
Everyday I get emails from Axios summarising news stories. The stories are mostly American and of little direct importance to me but I don’t mind. I like the newsletter as much for its craft as its content.
Having written a post about the seven deadly sins of making a finance presentation, it is natural (predictable) that I would write a companion post about the seven virtues.
Using the standard list of the seven deadly sins as a guide, here are seven things to avoid when giving a finance presentation.
You will notice over the next few months that the default font in your Microsoft apps will change from Calibri to Aptos. If you want to see what Aptos will look like it is already available in Microsoft Word under its original name of Bierstadt – which means beer town. I don’t particularly like Calibri but it is OK. My issue with its deployment in Microsoft’s apps is that the default point size was too small.
A hammer and chisel are tools. In the right hands they can be used to create wonderful works of art. In most hands they create rubble. A person has to learn how to use a tool and practise over and over until they become an expert. This is as true about accounting tools like Excel as it is for the hammer and chisel. ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence services that are popping up all of the internet and inside software applications are tools.
If you want the receivers of your finance reports to read them then you need to grab their attention at the top of your document. If you fail to do that they’ll skim your report (at best) or just do something else. Here are three ways you could start a finance report that will keep the reader reading. ✅ Make an unexpected or controversial statement (followed by supporting evidence). If making a bold statement is too much for you, you could instead re-frame the statement as a question.
I think somewhere during the journey towards a professional accounting qualification we adopt accounting-speak. Some of the words we learn are very specific, technical terms and we have to use them. I’m thinking of words like depreciation and recognition.
One of the nicest things about being an author is signing a copy of your book for someone. I don’t get to do as often as I’d like now the world is more about e-books and online learning, but sometimes I do.
Doing some great analysis and having useful insights counts for little if you cannot communicate them and yet these skills are not a core part of accounting training. As a result many accountants and auditors are not as good at written communication as they need to be. Chris Argyris wrote a seminal article for Harvard Business Review entitled, Teaching Smart People How to Learn. The gist of the article is that smart people are almost always successful at what they do.