As an accountant and financial advisor, your role is not limited to discovering and identifying the most crucial data insights for your clients. The most critical part of your job is transforming those insights into understandable financial stories. Poorly communicated insights or data that may mislead your clients can be more dangerous than not communicating the data.
Tips for Data Transformation
To be a successful financial storyteller, there are three must-dos that you need to keep in mind. First, know your audience. Tailor your message to the person or people who will be receiving it. Second, make the report relevant to the recipient and include how this information can solve a current problem or improve the bottom line. Third, create an easy-to-follow yet comprehensive financial report that focuses on the story without getting distracted with offshoot data bites.
Don’t Do These 3 Things
It’s also important to remember the three never-dos in financial storytelling. First, don’t report what the client wants to hear. As a financial advisor, your responsibility is to report the data in a way that the client will understand, not to make the data fit the narrative the client desires. Second, don’t tell the wrong story. Get to know your clients’ long-term and short-term goals, dreams, and personalities to choose the correct stories to tell. Third, don’t manipulate design choices. Be concise and clear about your data scale, units, key, and labels to avoid confusion.
Spreadsheets Are Not Effective
At Reach Reporting, we understand the importance of transforming financial insights into compelling stories. That’s why we’ve built a financial reporting software that empowers financial professionals to do their job, take that complicated spreadsheet, and showcase it in a way that both the accountant and their clients find insightful and engaging.
With Reach Reporting, you can easily create custom reports and dashboards that tell your clients’ financial stories in a way they will understand. Our software makes it easy to import data from various accounting software, create interactive charts and graphs, and customize the report with your client’s branding.
Keep Reports Updated
Reach Reporting’s software is also designed to keep your reports up-to-date, so you never have to worry about manually updating the numbers. With our software’s automatic data refresh, you can ensure that your clients always have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.
Helping your clients understand their finances can be an overwhelming yet rewarding experience. By becoming a better financial storyteller, you have the ability to change businesses, turn struggling stories into success stories, and help people reach their goals and dreams. With Reach Reporting, you can transform financial insights into compelling stories to help your clients make informed financial decisions.