Gary Bandy helps public sector finance professionals write clearer reports, papers, and posts by ghostwriting or improving what they’ve drafted.
I keep a note of sentences that are harder to read than they need to be. Most come from documents that are otherwise careful and correct: it is the writing that lets them down, not the thinking. Here is one I added last week, a definition of fraud. Fraud is
Busy readers skim headings and reads little else. Think of the committee member turning to your report the night before the committee meets, the chief executive rushing through a briefing note between meetings, or the finance director trying to catch up with a backlog of unread emails. They run an
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 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 2024/25. 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