The Briefcase 43: How To Do a Presentation Without Crying

Unfortunately, accountants can struggle under the limelight. It’s a stereotype, but it didn’t spring out of nowhere. It might seem that the numbers speak for themselves but they actually only speak to a select few.

If you’ve taken offense, we do recognise that there are thousands of accountants who can get the room going like Jordan Belfort in that one scene in Wolf of Wall Street. But, most accountants, like most people, aren’t natural performers.

But these skills matter – especially for finance professionals. At some point, every accountant has to explain the numbers to people who do not actually want the numbers. And these people are terribly busy, and they want the key points, and make it snappy.

Why accountants have to present

A presentation is a chance to influence decisions, build trust, and show that you understand what the figures mean. No one knows the limitations of the organisation better than you, so it’s the perfect opportunity to steer the overly ambitious CEO away from the total restructuring of the company.

In today’s crazy world, you are expected to advise, challenge, explain the risks, and occasionally say, "let’s not turn the second office into an escape room”, even if the proposed submarine theme is fresh, yet it greets you like an old friend.

So, presentation skills help you:

• Explain complex information clearly.
• Get buy-in for decisions.
• Make financial data useful to non-finance colleagues.
• Build credibility with senior people.

That said, it’s also good to send an email that just says "see attached” and add a 20 page workbook to it, too.

PowerPoint: Excel’s flashy sibling

PowerPoint is not evil. It has simply been present at the scene of many crimes.

Used well, slides can help you persuade colleagues to take proactive steps to tackle problems you’ve noticed. But they can also completely baffle your audience, if you’ve developed a narrative that makes sense only to you.

So, you can’t just stand there reading paragraphs from the screen. You also can’t Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V a spreadsheet. We shouldn’t be advising our audience to bring a torch and a packed lunch. No one should be left behind.

Try this instead:

• Limit yourself to one key point per slide.
• Make a headline for the conclusion, not the topic
• Use charts to show trends.
• Keep detailed tables in an appendix or handout.
• Most importantly, dumb it down – explain what those numbers mean!

Numbers do not speak for themselves. If they did, management accounts meetings would be shorter and frankly more terrifying.

Beyond Microsoft

PowerPoint is still the office standard, especially in larger organisations, but it is no longer the only option. Google Slides is strong for collaboration, Canva is popular for quick visual design, Prezi can help with non-linear storytelling, and tools like Gamma, Pitch and Beautiful.ai are increasingly used for faster AI-assisted or design-led deck creation.

The tool depends on the job:

• Google Slides – good when several people need to edit without sending back and forth documents with increasingly panicked titles.
• Canva – useful for polished visuals without needing a design degree.
• Prezi – good for big-picture storytelling, but use carefully unless you want the audience to feel like they are inside a financial theme park ride.
• PowerPoint – still excellent when you need a familiar face.

The point is not to use the trendiest tool, the point is to use the one that helps your audience understand the message. That said, the trendiest tool is trendy for a reason, so maybe try and crowbar it in there anyway.

Telling tales

Accountants are usually good at focusing on the evidence. Evidence is basically the job. And that’s half the battle when we’re trying to engender trust, but it’s not the whole battle. We need a bit of a story.

A good financial story has a clear shape:

• Where are we now?
• What has changed?
• Why does it matter?
• What should we do next?

For example, don’t just say "costs are up 12%”, say "costs are up 12%, mainly because supplier pricing changed in Q2. If that continues, our margin target is at risk. So, we have three options. The first: get rid of that meddlesome wretch, James Bond.”

That is a story – there’s tension, there are stakes, there’s James Bond.

Something will go wrong

There will be a hitch. The projector will fail, the clicker will stop working, and someone will ask, "this may be slightly off topic but has anyone seen The Pitt?” and loads of people will go "ooooo” and you’ll be standing there doing the waiting-for-someone-to-pass-you-in-the-corridor smile.

You can’t stop this, but you can know your material well enough that you can adapt. If something goes wrong: take a breath, skip what no longer works, and quickly return to the central point. Like when a politician is asked why they’re never seen in the same room as Batman, steer it back to the main message.

Silence is allowed. Sometimes it’s good to just silently stare into your CEO’s eyes for two minutes in the middle of the presentation. It can be good to do the "I’m the captain now” bit from that Tom Hanks film.

Actually, on second thought, that’s not good. But what is good is not waffling. Also, always have backups – cloud, USB, email, printed notes – whatever gets you through.

The notes are not a script

Notes are helpful, but scripts are dangerous. You don’t want to be staring at your phone the whole time – that’s what the audience will be doing.

Use prompts instead:

• Key words.
• Transition points.
• Statistics you must get right.
• Reminders to pause.
• The one joke you are absolutely not allowed to over-explain.

You’ll definitely need to do some practice to ensure you know what the key words you’ve scribbled down refer to – the worst thing is to see you’ve written something that looks like "brunk” on a Post-It and turn into a deer in the headlights.

🧠 Final thoughts

Presenting may never feel as natural to you. But that’s okay, because it probably won’t for most people. What you’ve got on your side is that you know your stuff, which puts you at a massive advantage compared to the sales person that messaged you asking what the "formula for profit” is.

Now you just need to translate what you know into something everyone can understand, which is still tricky, but not as hard as learning it all in the first place.

You don’t need to be the all singing all dancing accountant, but it might be good to look up from your notes once or twice.