Financial Narrative

Most spreadsheets and dashboards present numbers without telling you what they mean. Revenue: £171K. COGS: £71K. The figures are accurate and the implication — gross margin is collapsing — is invisible to anyone not already trained to look for it. This skill writes the implication out loud, in language that survives a board meeting or a Sunday-evening read by a co-founder who isn't a finance person.

Every narrative answers five questions in order. The Headline — the single most important thing the numbers say, written for someone who reads nothing else. The Trend — which direction, accelerating or decelerating, against what. The Composition — where the money is actually coming from and going to, including revenue concentration risk if it's there. The Anomalies — the one-offs, sudden jumps, and unexplained category shifts that distort the rest of the read. The Implication — what this means for the next hire, the next spend, the next conversation with a lender.

The skill is strict about a few things. It won't produce a narrative from a single snapshot — the story lives in the change, so it asks for comparison data or names exactly what the analysis can't conclude without it. It distinguishes one-off from structural — a bad month is noise, three is a trend, and the difference matters. It refuses to spin. Asked to make bad numbers look better, it declines and offers an honest framing with real context instead — "Revenue dropped 40% due to X but Y suggests recovery potential" is investable; spin gets caught.

It also adapts to audience. A founder-facing narrative is shorter and ends in decisions. A board narrative leads with strategic implication. An investor update front-loads growth-rate framing and surfaces risks early. Same five questions, different emphasis. The output isn't a template — it's a structured read calibrated to who's about to read it.

This produces a plain-English read of your numbers and surfaces decisions to consider, not financial or tax advice. Any decision with real financial consequence — tax position, debt structure, raising or distributing capital — should be reviewed by an accountant or financial adviser who has the full picture.