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 recommendations. A few
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 is
Tax Policy Associates has mapped 81 of the UK's 90 taxes onto a single interactive chart, ranked by revenue raised in 2024/45. The other 8 yield nothing at all, so they don't appear. The various taxes on employment account for almost half of all tax
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 struggle
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. 1. Put your bottom line first. You know the numbers inside out. So you present
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
Jargon isn't the same as precision. Finance professionals defend technical language as if the two are identical. They're not. Some technical terms are genuinely necessary. Accrual, materiality, going concern. These have specific meanings. Using them with a finance audience is legitimate. But most finance jargon isn&
It's probably the skill that will define your career more than any technical knowledge. I'm talking about clear writing. I qualified as a CIPFA accountant in 1990. I passed exams on accounting, audit, reporting, ethics. I learned how to prepare accounts and analyse budgets. But nobody