Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an accounting manager and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An accounting manager is responsible for every area that relates to financial reporting. He/She is the supervisors and evaluators of everyday activities in the financial field ensuring that every detail is implemented well enough. Though the primary responsibility is very straight forward, there are more responsibilities attached to them.
These responsibilities include, ensuring that both monthly and quarterly bank compliance activities are all performed in a timely and precise manner, establishing financial status through developing systems for collecting, verifying, analyzing and reporting information, maintaining a thorough understanding of the financial reporting and general ledger structure, supporting budgets and prediction activities as well as ensuring precise and timely processing of positive connections.
Core Skills Required to be an Accounting Manager
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
An accounting manager should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.
An Accounting Manager will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings do represent the entire picture while identifying, analyzing and solving problems by deducing consequences from what he knows and making use of the information gathered.
Problem Solving is the skill of defining a problem to determine its cause, identify it, prioritize and select alternative solutions to implement in solving the problems and reviving relationships.
An Accounting Manager has a fundamental role in finding ways to address all types of problems through having a good method to use when approaching a problem without being ineffective, favoring or causing painful consequences.
Knowledge of Company Processes:
Knowledge of Company Processes is the in-depth understanding of a collection of related, structured activities that serve a particular goal for a group of customers or clients who are valuable to the enterprise.
An Accounting Manager ought to maintain consistency across the daily processed while keeping a keen eye on the overall plan of the organization by ensuring the company processes are performed and followed.
Managing Remote Teams:
Managing Remote Teams is working under no physical supervision from your manager or supervisor while staying on task and communication to report on the daily progress.
An Accounting Manager ought to nurture, guide and support the employees to do their job right without compromising on the quality and wasting the allocated time to grow the team and the company as well.
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills:
Appraisal and Evaluation Skills are services that allow employers to assess their employees? contributions to the organization for the period they have been working with them.
An Accounting Manager must creatively develop a robust evaluation process that includes the standard evaluation form, approved performance measures, guidelines for presenting feedback and disciplinary procedures to promote staff recognition and rewarding following a fair assessment and appraisal process.
Flexibility is an important skill that allows employers and employees to make an arrangement about working on maintaining a work/life balance to help organizations improve the productivity and efficiency of their balance.
An Accounting Manager needs creative ideas on how to plan flexible schedules for all his employees by incorporating flexible working arrangements and individual flexibility agreements that allow negotiation to change how certain agreements apply to them and how they can be adjusted.
Self Confidence is the ability to know who you are and what you are capable of doing which shows in your behavior, your body language, how you speak, etc.
An Accounting Manager must be confident enough to inspire confidence in others while encouraging them to handle daily tasks and their personal lives with self-confidence that will, in turn, produce a well-rounded individual.
Enjoyment of the Job:
Enjoyment of the Job is the ability to enjoy what you do rather than enjoying what you earn from it.
An Accounting Manager needs to creatively learn of ways to motivate his employees to benefit from the workplace by matching their personality to the culture of the organization where they fit best and allowing them to explore their hidden talents to grow and mature with the team.
Problem/Situation Analysis is the ability to solve problems and assess situations to know what kind of solution is required to calm it down.
An Accounting Manager should learn how to identify and analyze problems and situations as well as use available resources to resolve them constructively by reaching a consensus through looking at an issue in a professional, not personal way.
Financial Management is the skill of learning how to handle accounting, finance, and organizational management through providing daily data on the operations that take place every day.
An Accounting Manager ought to be highly effective in planning and organization, controlling and management of the financial resources to achieve the company's organizational objectives that are laid down to see the growth of the enterprise.
Hard Skills Required to be an Accounting Manager
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
An accounting manager should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.