Accountants today play a key role in advising entrepreneurs. However, advice only has impact when financial information is genuinely understood. This study therefore explores how accountants themselves perceive their use of pedagogical skills during annual discussions of the financial statements with client entrepreneurs.

Based on semi-structured interviews with ten accountants from a Belgian mid-sized organisation, this study examines which pedagogical skills accountants report applying and how they use these skills when explaining financial figures. Drawing on the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework, the findings indicate that accountants report using basic pedagogical skills, such as non-technical language, examples, and visual support.

At the same time, their own reflections reveal that accountants often pay limited attention to client entrepreneurs’ levels of expertise during explanations. Understanding is mainly assessed through generic prompts or non-verbal cues, rather than through targeted comprehension checks. This suggests that pedagogical skills are applied primarily in an intuitive manner in practice.

By explicitly positioning pedagogical skills as a component of professional skills, this study contributes to the accounting education literature. It provides a rationale for deliberately integrating these skills into accounting curricula, so that future accountants can deploy their technical expertise not only accurately, but also in a way that is understandable and meaningful in their advisory role.

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