Excerpts from the Introduction

Writing High-Impact Reports:
Proven Practices for Auditors and Accountants

By Angela J. Maniak

Why You Need This Book to Succeed
in Your Profession

Your clients rely on you—an audit or financial professional—to provide them
with critical business information they need to manage their work successfully.
Your clients—individuals, groups, organizations, or corporations—depend on you
to help decipher the meaning of numbers, recommend appropriate accounting
methods, analyze controls or operating systems, or conclude on the correctness
of information. In short, they rely on you to help them and their businesses save,
make, or manage money.

The way you help your clients succeed is by offering them the information they
need, in a form and style they can use and act on. Most often, clients need
and want this information in writing. They may need to decide actions on the
basis of your report, distribute your results to other individuals or groups, keep a
historical record, or even fulfill regulatory or legal requirements. Clients depend
on your written communications to help them achieve these goals.
The reports you write must meet your readers' particular needs. They must be:

• Compact and easy to read.
• Understandable to a broad, often non-financial, audience.
• Compelling and persuasive.

To meet such needs, you cannot simply present the detailed data that results
from the research and analysis you do. You must condense, consolidate, and
prioritize your points. You must present your conclusions and recommendations
in a written form that is easy to understand and act upon. Therefore, as an
accounting, auditing, or financial professional, you are likely to spend much of
your working life writing reports. Unfortunately, writing may not be your favorite
part of the job.

Copyright 2005 Angela J. Maniak

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Your Payback from Using This Book

The goal of my book is to enable you to write it right the first time. I take the 
unique approach of focusing on what you need to do before writing a report.
Following the step-by-step process I recommend will make composition and
self-review faster and will enable you to:

• Write more quickly.
• Publish timely reports.
• Minimize rewriting by self or others.

This book will teach you to present your results clearly, concretely, convincingly,
and concisely. It will show you how to avoid costly edits and rewrites. You will
learn to compose efficiently, review your own writing thoroughly, and produce
polished, professional reports. You will also understand how to determine what
your readers expect of your documents and — even more important — how to
display the value of your work through your written communication.

Who Will Benefit from This Book

This book is uniquely customized for accounting, audit, and financial
professionals. Those who will benefit most include:

• Accounting managers and directors
• Business analysts
• Compliance auditors
• Credit analysts
• Environmental auditors
• Financial analysts
• Government auditors
• Internal auditors
• Internal-control specialists
• Loan reviewers
• Public accountants
• Quality-control specialists
• Tax professionals

Ultimately, your clients will be the key beneficiaries of this book, as they profit
from your clear, concise, useful reports.

Copyright 2005 Angela J. Maniak

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