As a newly-qualified accountant I took a time management course. It still helps me today. One part of it was how to deal with incoming post. I learned there were four things you could do with an incoming item of post. They were, in descending order of preference: throw it in the bin, delegate it to someone, file it, or act on it. Over the decades since I took that course post has been replaced by email and I receive far more email messages every day than I ever had letters.

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On LinkedIn there are 202,622 people (including me) who follow the hashtag #accounting but it seems there are no posts that use the hashtag. Until I wrote one today. Hello to the other 202,621 people. I’m a Chartered Public Finance Accountant (CPFA). I post sometimes about #PublicFinancialManagement but mostly I post advice for accountants to improve their writing and presentation skills. This is because I think that accounting is about words more than numbers and the accountants who will be most successful are the ones who can communicate their insights to their colleagues and clients.

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That’s a question asked by Aaron Orendorff in a NYT article, Your Colleagues Don’t Read Anything You Write, in 2020. His answer: In truth, probably not. We can, however, make it easy on our colleagues to read it, respond to it and take action. In his article he explains 8 actions you can take in your writing to give yourself the best chance of being read: Write less often Use fewer words Put action words in your subject line Listen more, say less Don’t answer, ask Lead with the need Write a TL;DR Write about us, not you or them

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As a trainee accountant I was taught that money is a means of exchange, a store of value and a unit of accounting, all at the same time. All rather abstract. In my introduction to Public Financial Management lecture I ask students what they think money is before introducing them to the concept that money is, in fact, debt. And that it is created by banks as well as by governments, at the touch of a keypad.

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A: Cut out 33% of the words. I’ve been reading a series of articles by Jason Zweig, a writer for the Wall Street Journal. The figures above are his. He is a strong advocate for cutting your writing. As he put it: The point of cutting your writing isn’t to make it shorter. The point of cutting it is to make it better. He goes so far as to outline his method for cutting words.

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Long reports usually have an executive summary that is maybe only 1 or 2 per cent as long as the report. Isn’t this an admission that 98% of the report is not needed? As the writer of a long report, which readers do you expect to read the whole thing rather than the summary? Do you expect anyone to read every word you wrote? One thing you can be confident about is that your most important readers – the decision-makers – will read only the summary.

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Richard Feynman said, “If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.”

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A reviewer of Financial Management and Accounting in the Public Sector wrote: “Gary Bandy has the ability of making complicated topics simple.” If you work in the public sector you can see some of my writing for yourself by downloading a free copy of the e-book I wrote about public procurement a few years ago. It’s a short book. It uses the example of hiring a consultant to explain the stages in procurement.

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Here’s a tip public sector finance professionals in particular, but it could be useful to people in the private sector, too. CIPFA includes communication and impact as one of the key competencies for public financial management professionals. That means developing skills in telling stories with financial data. As luck would have it, late in 2022 the World Bank published A Guide to Data Storytelling in the Public Sector. The opening chapter begins with this quotation from Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.

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When I began working as a trainee accountant there were very few computers in the office and they were not on individuals’ desks. They were on tables because to be used on a shared basis. Most people in the Accountancy team did not use them at all. They used calculators and created spreadsheets manually on A3-sized analysis paper. And when they had to write a report or a letter or memo they did it by hand.

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