Your marketing team struggles with complex financial reports. How can you make them easier to understand?

Incorporating visual aids such as charts, graphs, and infographics can significantly enhance the comprehension of complex financial reports. Visual representations make it easier to identify trends, patterns, and key metrics at a glance, which can be especially useful for a marketing team that may not be familiar with detailed financial jargon.

Visual aids not only help teams better understand complex metrics, but can provide a more holistic viewpoint of trends and how different data elements interact. I have found the most successful financial reports combine charts, graphs, with tables and leverage colors (red, green, yellow) as visual cues.

Good data visualisation can help simplify communicating key takeaway points. However, it can be easy for technical people to end up making complex visuals, which are trying to convey too many potential points. In order to help tell a story, you need to prioritise and structure the key points you want to convey (typically top down), and then typically use one chart to help support each point (try to avoid killing multiple birds with one stone).

Language can be a tricky thing in finance and accounting, as each technical term will carry with it, different nuances with the definitions associated with the terms. It's important for corporate finance and accounting professionals to understand the context of different reports, and the implications of using particular metrics (i.e. you don't want to introduce wrong incentives). For example, Sales reports, should you base sales on accruals, cash, including or excluding discounts, or provisions for doubtful debts. For non-technical audiences, it maybe best to use "simpler terms" people might be familiar with, but footnote these with the technical term, along with any notes on how this number might differ to similar sounding metrics.

Financial reports often contain complex terminology that can be challenging for non-financial professionals to understand. To make these reports more accessible, use straightforward language and avoid unnecessary jargon. Providing clear definitions for any financial terms that must be used can also help. Additionally, use concise sentences and bullet points to break down information into manageable chunks.

With KPI's it's important to understand how these are being used by your marketing team (or other teams), and ensure they are incentivising long term behaviours which are in the best interest of adding value. Too many KPI's for different teams are likely to lead to goal incongruency, with teams behaving in ways that maybe at the cost of other teams KPI's.

Highlighting the most important information in your financial reports helps business teams focus on what matters most. Start by identifying the key metrics and data points that are relevant to the marketing function, such as budget allocations, return on investment (ROI), and customer acquisition costs. Structure the report so that these focus points are prominently displayed, either at the beginning or in a separate executive summary. This approach allows business teams to quickly understand the financial performance areas that directly impact their strategies and decision making processes.

The most successful training sessions come not only from training our teams but from having our teams teach someone else. Often, after I have trained someone to understand a report or series of metrics, I will ask them to teach someone else on the team. This exercise not only helps that individual uncover areas where they may need clarity or emphasis, but hearing questions and a different point of view often helps cement the information even further.

Offering training sessions on financial literacy can empower your marketing team to better understand complex financial reports. These sessions can cover basic financial concepts, the interpretation of key financial statements, and how to read various financial metrics.

Whether it's marketing or any other part of the business, it's important to have continuous feedback, as it's impossible to get everything right the first time. In the short term, metrics or visuals may need to be tweaked, and in the longer term, you may have more opportunity to introduce more complicated and nuanced reports, if you have been successful in training the marketing team to be more financially savvy.