Team members who do not have a background in accounting may not understand the financial information about your company or why it matters.

As an accounting professional, you need to take steps to overcome this barrier. The following are some suggestions.

How To Explain Financials Information To Your Team

· Share simplified versions of the financial statements that revolve around your company’s most critical numbers. These include the key metrics required for employees to understand how the financials of the business are created.

· Talk about the real-time numbers and what can be done differently now to create a better future.

· Make the operational and financial realities interesting, understandable, and relevant to everyone in the organization.

· Show how employees at all levels create the financials through the decisions they make and the actions they take.

Use these best practices to explain financial information to your non-financial team.

Explain What Your Team Finds Relevant and Useful

When explaining financial information, your goal is to share words and numbers that your team can use to measure their performance, discuss improvements, and make more informed decisions. Examples include the following:

· How profitability is driven

· What are your key assets and how they are used

· How cash is generated

· How production efficiency is calculated

· Why receivable days matter

· How the purchase of a new computer system will affect the income statement and balance sheet

· How employees’ day-to-day actions impact the business

Show Why the Numbers Matter

Your team needs to understand what the company is about, how it makes money, where it is headed, and how success is measured.

· Talk about the company’s customers, market, its strategy, its competitive advantages, and what it is focusing on over the next few years.

· Share what is happening with the organization and how it may impact your team.

· Establish a connection between what your team members individually and collectively do every day and how it impacts the financial outcome of the business.

· Demonstrate how your team can make a difference in the future of the company and remove roadblocks for operational users.

· Give your team regular opportunities to see and use the numbers they impact so they better understand and remember them.

Provide Formal Training and Informal Practice

Continue to repeat the above process to put the numbers into context for your team. Then, reinforce the training through frequent engagements around the numbers.

· You may want to blend formal training and informal practices during your weekly team meetings.

· Team members who use the numbers every day understand them better than other team members.

· Your business literacy training needs to be part of your culture for greater success within the organization.

Need to Find Accounting and Finance Employees?

Explaining financial information in a way that employees understand helps them make better decisions. When they understand the impact their daily actions have on the company’s finances, the employees can behave in ways that are more favorable to the bottom line.

When you need to hire accounting and finance employees for your company in Winnipeg, partner with Mercer Bradley. We have the vetted candidates you need to move your business forward.