The communication skill your qualification never taught you
Look at a typical business report. The effort is obvious. The charts are in the brand colours. The KPIs sit in little speedometer gauges. The risks are a grid of red, amber and green. There is a table so dense the total has to be picked out in bold. It
Open almost any board report pack and you will find one. A table that fills a whole page: thirty budget lines, three years of comparatives, variances in pounds and again in per cent, all set in eight-point type so it fits. Somewhere in that table is the one number
A hyperlink is a decluttering tool. It lets you move supporting material out of the sentence and behind a word or phrase, so the text stays clean and the reader who wants the detail can still reach it. This works for a quick email as much as a full report.
The monthly accounts land in a manager's inbox. The figures are right. The statements are complete. The accountant who prepared them has done the work and moved on, on the quiet assumption that the numbers speak for themselves. The manager will see what they show. They will not.
Every accountancy qualification tests technical knowledge: bookkeeping, IFRS, audit standards, tax, treasury. None of them test whether you can write a paper that changes a decision, or explain a number to someone who's already made up their mind. By the time someone reaches CFO, or chief auditor, or
Most accountants don’t think they have a writing problem. There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not complacency. The professional training system never showed them they did. To pass accountancy exams, you need technical accuracy. Marks go to correct calculations, sound judgements, appropriate
In a 2024 survey, Deloitte asked 200 CFOs what quality they valued most when choosing their successor. 39% said communication skills — the ability to explain results clearly and simply. It was the top answer. Not technical knowledge. Not financial acumen. Not strategic thinking. Communication. Every board paper you write
Tax Policy Associates has mapped 81 of the UK's 90 taxes onto a single interactive chart, ranked by revenue raised in 2024/25. The other 8 yield nothing at all, so they don't appear.  The various taxes on employment account for almost half of all
Most public finance reports are written for the writer, not the reader. The structure follows convention. The headings mirror last year's version. The executive summary is four pages long. The recommendations are at the end. Nobody planned it that way. It just happened because the incentive was to
Most accountants and auditors don't trust their readers. And it shows in their writing. They repeat themselves, use jargon when plain words would do, and explain things twice, just in case. This backfires. When readers get a dense, jargon-heavy document, one of two things happens: • They
I signed a contract today for the 4th edition of Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector. It will be published by Routledge in early 2028. The 4th edition will include new material on: Gender budgeting Sustainability reporting The use of AI in public finance. These aren't
Office workers spend 31% of their time in MS Office on formatting. That's more than a day a week spent on fonts and margins instead of thinking. The real problem is not the formatting itself. It's that people open Word or PowerPoint before the content is
It's unread because of three fixable mistakes. Most unread documents aren't ignored because the content is bad. They're ignored because of structure and presentation failures that are entirely fixable. Put your bottom line first. You know the numbers inside out. So you present them
Cluttered slides don't just bore your audience. They undermine the audience's trust in your financial judgement. I've sat through hundreds of finance presentations. The worst ones all make the same mistake: cramming too much onto each slide. Budget variance tables with 15 columns. Bullet
The problem with most financial documents is that they're written backwards. The writer starts at the beginning of their analysis and drags the reader through every step until they finally reach the conclusion. It's exhausting and it wastes time. The way you solve a problem is