Presentation skills for finance professionals

Working in a finance team, we might build beautiful reports or financial models which we are enormously proud of, as we have usually put a huge amount of work into. These models are not helpful, however, if other people are not able to actually use or understand them and their messages and use them to make decisions. One of the things – and often the missing piece – for financial modellers is having the skills to present the output of the model in a way that is useful and easy for others to interpret.

Here are a few tips with you on how to help others interpret your models;
► Excel is not a presentation tool – do not just dump a spreadsheet into PowerPoint.
► Add visuals as well as numbers. Finance people are used to looking at numbers all day every day, but even we find visuals easier to interpret than tables of data.
► Spend some time tidying up your charts; do not expect that the numbers will speak for themselves. That is your job; to make it so that the meaning just leaps off the page at them.
► Remove clutter, make it really clear, think about the data to ink ratio – unless it’s contributing to your message – get rid of it!
► In a financial model, documentation of assumptions is particularly important – but it doesn’t go in your summary. Be selective about the critical data to show in the summary.