Why my accounting newsletter looks and sounds the way it does 

For a long time I've wanted to create an image that's more interesting - in computer terminology, less grayscale - than the images adopted by other accountants. Accountants have generally let their work speak for them, while tending to blend into the background in some ways. This has inspired their clients' confidence. After all, managing someone else's money should require a conservative, demure demeanor, at least during working hours. It’s also the nature of financial reporting to report transactions and events conservatively. 

Projecting a conservative image is a principle I fully agree with. However, I don't see why we accountants can't communicate in a more interesting way with those we do business with, and with other members of the public. That would make it easier for us to get our ideas across. It may also cause prospective clients to view us less as dullards, and more as people they can easily relate to, and whom they can trust to manage their financial resources. To put it briefly, a newsletter like this one is designed to make an accountant like me more worthy of hiring in a client’s eyes.

This newsletter expresses who I am, what I have to say, and what others have to say, but in a professional manner. If you look at my website, you'll have to agree that it, too, is more distinctive than many accountant websites. The images in this newsletter aren't as colorful as those featured on the MailChimp website; there you'll see a banana split, a microscope and a flying saucer, for example. Nonetheless, what I've done with the design of this newsletter apparently goes outside of the traditional accounting newsletter framework.

From a philosophical point of view, what I’ve read had to be interesting, or I wouldn’t read it; so it’s appropriate that any newsletter I publish should be interesting. Yet this newsletter isn’t just interesting; it’s informative as well. In that way it reflects my curiosity and desire to stay informed about events that matter.

As concerns the newsletter format, you’ll notice that it employs a multi-column format. That’s because my objective is to reduce the amount of scrolling with a mouse necessary to read the articles. Ideally I’d like for you to be able to see the entire newsletter in one glance, or at least with a minimum of scrolling required to view the entire newsletter. I’ve received newsletters from other professionals that present the information in one column, which means that you have to scroll down the page to read the entire newsletter. The more content there is, the more you have to scroll. I found that the amount of scrolling I did online, or in a virtual document, thus became somewhat tedious on a cumulative basis. An analogy to this in the physical world would be the continuous unrolling of a parchment – probably the ultimate example would be the Jewish Torah. I’m trying to make my virtual newsletter more concise and less tiresome to read.

To determine whether I’m meeting those objectives, I pasted the contents of this newsletter, not including the footer section, into an MS Word document. It took up three pages, compared with four pages for newsletters that I received from three other professionals. I’ll try to reduce this newsletter’s length to one page if I can, without sacrificing the quality and quantity of the content.

Similarly, when an article is longer than a few sentences, as this one is, you’ll be able to read the beginning of it in the newsletter and the rest of it on my blog. This approach saves bandwidth and space on your computer’s hard drive.

The way the articles are written, too, differs from the style used in other accounting newsletters. That's due to the influence of my two former newsletter publishers, Joyce K. and Roger W., whom I affectionately call my newsletter "professors". They persuaded me to write in a more informal style than the way I’m used to writing, and to tell a story or use a personal anecdote when writing about a certain topic.

The effort to come up with the most interesting, the most effective way of writing what I wish to express is a challenge. Coping with that challenge helps prevent this newsletter from being dry and ordinary.

Should I come across another accounting newsletter that attracts more readers, I may wish to write articles for it. I may even abandon this publication if I find another that’s more suitable for communicating accounting and tax information.