The skill nobody trains for

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 partner, communication has quietly become the job. The technical work still matters, but someone else usually does most of it. What the senior person actually does, most days, is write, edit what others wrote, present, and persuade.

I spent 19 years in public sector finance, the last three as a finance director. Nobody trained me for that shift. I learned it by getting it wrong in front of committees who had better things to do than decode my paperwork.

Here's what I'd have found useful to know earlier.

Write for the decision, not the record

Most financial documents are written to be defensible rather than useful, covering all the bases so no one can say something was omitted. That's a different aim from helping the readers decide. Before you write anything, ask what decision or action the document needs to produce and structure it backwards from that.

Put the conclusion first

Accountancy training teaches you to build an argument from evidence to conclusion. Most readers want it the other way round: conclusion first, supported by evidence (that is available for them to read if they want). This one change does more for a document's usefulness than any amount of polishing.

Say what changed and why it matters

Numbers on their own don't communicate anything. A variance, a forecast, a balance means nothing until someone says what changed and why the reader should care. That sentence is usually missing, and it's usually the only one that matters.

Practise on real documents

CPD schemes rarely address this because it's hard to test. The only way to get better is to take something you've actually written, it could be a report, a briefing paper or a business case, and rewrite it with a specific reader in mind, then compare the two.

None of this is complicated. It's also not taught, which is why so many technically excellent finance professionals reach senior roles and then struggle with the part of the job no one warned them about.