Accounting needs words as well as numbers
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. A column of figures does not carry its own explanation. The manager sees a variance but not why it happened, a balance but not whether to worry, a total but not what to do next. The accountant sees all of that because they have been living in the detail. The message that is obvious to the accountant is not obvious to the reader.
This is the part of the job that too often goes undone. Producing the statement is the half we train for. Explaining what it means—what has changed, what it tells us, what should happen next—is the half that decides whether any of it has the right effect. And it is done with words.
The belief underneath everything I write here, is that accounting needs words as well as numbers. The numbers have to be right, of course, but having the right figures is only the start. The work is in explaining it.
And here is where things go wrong a second time. When accountants reach for words, too often they recycle the stock phrases handed down by their predecessors. ‘It should be noted that.’ ‘The overspend is attributable to.’ The language is inherited rather than chosen, and it is not aimed at the accountant’s reader. The old language signals that a professional has written something professional-sounding. It does not explain anything to anybody.
The unspoken excuse is that this is how finance writing is meant to be. Plain words would look unserious.
But the reader is often not another accountant. And even when they are, they would rather read a clear sentence than a foggy one. No qualified accountant secretly prefers a long, hedged, jargon-filled paragraph to a short plain one that tells them what they need to know. Nobody does. The inherited style serves the writer's sense of belonging, not the reader's understanding.
The skill I am encouraging accountants and auditors to develop is not writing in any decorative sense. It is caring who the reader is, working out what they need to take from the numbers and saying it in words they will absorb. That is harder to do than re-using the familiar cliches. It is also the whole point.
Numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have. Someone has to speak for them, in plain words, to the reader they are intended for.
