Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a staff accountant and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
Staff Accountant provides the administration with financial information through researching and analyzing accounts and preparing accurate financial statements. They work under the supervision of a controller, a director or a certified public accountant.
Their responsibilities come in a wide range and includes, preparing combined external and internal financial statements and analyzing information from the ledger system, and other departments makes accounting entries while sustaining records and files, reconciling accounts, preparing payments by increasing expenses and assigning account numbers and reconciling accounts, promoting and implementing accounting procedures by analyzing current procedures, maintaining and balancing automated systems by inputting the right data.
Core Skills Required to be a Staff Accountant
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.
A staff accountant should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Presentation Skills:
Presentation Skills are useful in getting your message or opinion out there in many aspects of life and work, though they are mostly used in businesses, sales, teaching, lecturing, and training.
A Staff Accountant must develop the confidence and capability to offer excellent presentations and captivate the audience when the need arises; it requires a lot of preparation to stand out from the crowd, and a manager should be willing to invest in it.
Innovation:
Innovation is the process of translating new invention into a service that creates value or brings better solutions that meet the requirements.
A Staff Accountant ought to introduce innovation in their business to help save time and money giving a competitive advantage to grow and adapt the business in today's marketplace as well as creating more efficient processes and ideas with a likelihood for your business to succeed.
Multi-Tasking:
Multi-Tasking allows one to juggle and perform more than one task at a time without losing track of what you are working on or dropping the ball.
A Staff Accountant must learn the trick of multitasking and help the staff balance the competing demands of their time and energy that they are expected to handle multiple priorities every day without compromising on the effectiveness of the work done.
Giving Feedback:
Giving Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop employees and improve performance through honest feedback of the work done best and areas that need improvement.
A Staff Accountant should be skilled in giving out both praise and criticism in a wise way to occasionally show workers where they need to improve and providing them with an observer's insight into the progress of their performance.
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.
A Staff Accountant 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:
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.
A Staff Accountant 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.
Personal Growth:
Personal Growth is the improvement of one's awareness, identity, developing talents and potential to facilitate the growth of oneself and the position they handle at the workplace.
A Staff Accountant ought to assist his employees in finding themselves by introducing or referring them to methods, programs, tools, techniques and assessment systems that support their development at the individual level in the organization.
Following Directions:
Following Directions is the skill of carefully considering the given instructions and following them closely without fail.
A Staff Accountant must ensure that his workers are paying attention and listening to instructions provided as well as taking careful steps in doing what they are supposed to do and understand what it means to the business and bring satisfaction to their superiors.
Problem/Situation Analysis:
Problem/Situation Analysis is the ability to solve problems and assess situations to know what kind of solution is required to calm it down.
A Staff Accountant 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.
Knowledge Management:
Knowledge Management is the ability to manage knowledge and information that is presented to the company from different sources without overlooking any of them.
A Staff Accountant ought to creatively channel all the new information, tools, input, and methodology mean by actively practicing the art of knowledge management within the business by harnessing the organization's inherent wisdom's platform in one place.
Hard Skills Required to be a Staff Accountant
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.
A staff accountant should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.