Helping public sector managers get value for money from their budgets
A blog about public financial management: the fine art of managing public money to deliver vital services to the public. It involves budgeting, accounting, controlling, auditing, reporting, policy-making and decision-taking.
A common piece of advice for aspiring creative writers is to read as much as you can. I think we can apply that to accountants who want to improve their writing skills. They should read finance reports and documents written by others, inside and outside their organisation, but I would add a qualification ...
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I’m going to pivot. I’ve been a public finance accountant for 30 years and up to now I’ve written posts relating to public financial management. Actually, what I am really interested in is writing. So from now on…
I am going to post tips, stories and resources about writing with an emphasis on how they can be used by accountants and finance professionals to improve their work outputs.
One assumes that all accountants are numerate but how many of them have ever received training in writing? And yet, accountants are nothing without words. Their role is to summarise and analyse financial transactions in ways that generate meaningful information that they then have to communicate to an audience, whether that be internally to managers or externally to investors, auditors and the general public.
I think there is scope for many accountants to improve their written output: not just long-form reports but also emails, letters and slide decks. Some of the improvement is literally about the words they use and the order they assemble them but they can also improve the way they set out data in tables and charts and the layout of all that on the page or screen.
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When it comes to writing financial reports I encourage you to adopt a plain, direct style. If you do not then, at best, your reports will be over-written and, at worst, you will obfuscate the message you are trying to communicate. (I suppose I should, on that basis, permit over-writing if your intention is to obfuscate!)
Read MoreGood design helps people to use products and this applies to spreadsheets and financial models as much as it does to smartphones and websites. When you create a spreadsheet you should consider how it is formatted as part of its overall design. I have made a short video with three tips for formatting your spreadsheets to ensure they are useable.
Read MoreOne of my goals for 2019 is to get my online school up and running and today I have published my first proper course. It’s a short course, taught mostly using videos, about the standards and principles that underpin good financial models. By adopting these principles you will make fewer errors in your spreadsheets and it will be easier for you, and others, to modify or revise the model after it is built. And because you have skills that are seldom taught to accountants you will stand out from the crowd.
The course fee is £49 but you can get 25% off From today until until 28 February 2019 by using the coupon code LAUNCH25. Get the course here.
This course is the first of five that I have planned under the umbrella of Skills for (Public Sector) Accountants. All five of the courses are about areas of work that are important to accountants but which are not taught in a professional accounting qualification. Following on from the financial modelling course will be courses about report writing, making presentations, managing suppliers and measuring value for money.
The remaining four courses in the bundle will be published over the first few months of 2019. If you want to get each course as it is published and save yourself more than half the price you can buy the whole bundle of five courses now and, until the end of February 2019, using the coupon code LAUNCH25 will get you 25% off the early bird price of £99.
January 1st is an arbitrary day to be the first day of the year. As a former public servant in the UK I would also see 1 April as the first day of the financial year. Several years ago I wrote a post explaining why the UK tax year starts on 6 April (which itself refers to the first day of the year traditionally being 25th March, “Conception Day”). Anyway, 1 January is the conventional start of the year in terms of the change from 2018 to 2019 (CE, not AD) and the extended break I had over the Christmas and new year period has given me a chance to think about this blog.
Read More© Gary Bandy 2024
