How to Explain Numbers to Non-Finance People

The thing it is best at

You have watched it happen. You take a client through their year end, carefully, patiently, and their eyes do the thing. They nod. They say "so is that good?" and you realise the last eleven minutes went nowhere.

The gap is not intelligence. Your client runs a business and understands it far better than you do. The gap is that you speak fluent accounts and they do not, and translation is a genuine skill that has nothing to do with the skill of preparing the accounts in the first place.

This is where AI is not merely adequate but excellent. Translation is its home ground. Give it verified figures and a description of who is reading, and it will produce a draft that is clearer than the one you would have written at half past six on a Thursday.

There is exactly one catch, and it is a serious one, so let us take it before the good news.

The placeholder trick

The cleanest defence is not to let it handle the numbers at all. Ask for the narrative with placeholders, then paste in your own verified figures.

It feels laborious for about one draft, then it feels like the obvious way to work. And it gives you something valuable: an explicit list of every figure the narrative depends on, which is exactly the checklist you need anyway.

Write a short commentary on these results for a reader who runs
the business but has no finance training.
Do not write any figures. Wherever a figure belongs, write a placeholder
in this style: FIG1, FIG2, FIG3.
At the end, list every placeholder with a plain English description
of exactly which figure I need to insert and from which statement it comes.
Tone: plain, warm, direct, second person. No jargon.
If you use a term like working capital, explain it in the same sentence.
Length: about 250 words.
Here is what happened this period, in my own words:
[describe the story, without figures]

Now you insert the numbers, reading each one off the statement as you go. You cannot skim past a figure you are physically typing.

Writing for a specific person

Generic commentary is useless commentary. The tool cannot know that your client is a builder who thinks in jobs and vans rather than in periods and accruals, or that the board member who asks the hardest questions used to be a treasurer. Tell it.

My reader is: [describe them honestly. What do they run?
What do they already understand? What have they misunderstood before?
What are they worried about?]
Rewrite the commentary for that person specifically.
Rules:

Lead with what it means for them, not with what the statement shows.
Use comparisons from their world, not from finance.
Keep every figure exactly as I have written it. Do not round,
restate, recalculate or convert anything into a percentage.
If you think a figure is wrong or inconsistent, say so at the end
in a note to me. Do not change it in the text.

That fourth rule catches something real. Rewrites are where figures quietly drift, turning into rounded versions of themselves or reappearing as percentages the tool worked out for itself. Lock them down and check them again after every rewrite, not just after the first draft.

The difficult conversation

The other place this earns its keep is preparation. Not the email itself, but the twenty minutes before a hard call about cashflow, an overdue tax liability, or fees.

I need to have a difficult conversation with a client about
[describe the situation in general terms, no identifying detail].
Help me prepare. Give me:

The three things they are most likely to be feeling before I speak.
The five hardest questions they might ask me.
For each question, what a defensive answer sounds like
and what a straight answer sounds like.
Two sentences I could open with that are honest
and do not sound rehearsed.
Do not write me a script and do not include any figures.
I will bring the figures myself.

Item three is worth the price of admission. Seeing your own defensive answer written down in advance is an oddly effective way of never saying it out loud.

Before you send

Four checks, roughly three minutes.

Read every figure against the source. Not the summary of the source, the source itself. Then check the direction of travel, because "improved" and "fell" are single words that flip a whole paragraph's meaning and are exactly the kind of thing that gets generated rather than derived. Then look for any figure you did not put there yourself, because if a number appeared during a rewrite, delete it or verify it. And finally check for confident claims about causes. "Margin improved because of the new pricing" is a claim about the business, not about the accounts, and unless you know that to be true, it is fiction with a decimal point attached.