Cumulants represent a natural language for expressing macroscopic properties of many-body systems. The most important property of cumulants is that of size consistency, i.e. a cumulant expression for an extensive variable scales with the size of the system, independent of possible further approximations used in the evaluation procedure. Cumulants can be considered as a generalization of linked diagrams known from diagrammatic technique of many-body theory. In this paper we outline a recently introduced method based on cumulants in order to derive expressions for zero-temperature properties of many-particle systems, i.e. the ground-state energy, static expectation values and dynamical correlation functions. This cumulant formalism allows one to describe weakly and strongly correlated systems along the same lines. We show that the coupled-cluster method known from quantum chemistry can be derived from our cumulant approach. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the cumulant method by applying it to examples from solid-state physics and quantum chemistry.