Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an accounts payable associate and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

An Accounts Payable Associate is responsible for providing financial, administrative and clerical support by ensuring payments are completed and all expenses controlled by receiving payments, processing, verifying and reconciling invoices according to the established policies and procedures in an efficient, timely and accurate manner.

The major responsibilities include Settling processed work by validating entries and comparing system records to balances, charging expenses to reports and cost centers by examining invoices and recording entries, matching purchase orders to invoices and entering invoices into computer, paying employees by receiving and verifying expense reports for advances, preparing checks, paying vendors by monitoring discount opportunities, reviewing federal ID numbers, maintaining accounting ledgers by verifying and posting account transactions, protecting organization's value by keeping information confidential.

Core Skills Required to be an Accounts Payable Associate

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 accounts payable associate should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Critical Thinking:

Critical Thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally while understanding the logical connection between ideas in a reflective and independent thinking.

An Accounts Payable Associate 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.

Accuracy:

Accuracy refers to the closeness of a measured value to a known value or standard that is passed by the governing laws.

An Accounts Payable Associate has to always be accurate with figures and data used and required in the office without any guesswork or estimations to facilitate precise and correct information in every department creating an authentic environment that will be respected by the workers.

Administrative Skills:

Administrative Skills are all the services related to the running of a business or keeping an office organized while supporting the efforts of the management team.

An Accounts Payable Associate must develop these skills and emphasize the administrative skills to ensure high-level responsibilities that range from planning large scale events to creating presentations and analyzing financial data are handled carefully and efficiently.

Collaborating with others:

Collaborating is willingly working with one another and cooperating in whatever task one is assigned without behaving poorly or having an attitude change that hurts others.

An Accounts Payable Associate is meant to collaborate with all workers and management both male and female without causing frustrations or sidelining any worker or delaying their promotion from any informal conversations where most decisions are often made.

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.

An Accounts Payable Associate 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.

Competitiveness:

Competitiveness is the skill of being able to compete as a team or a company with other enterprises in the same line of entrepreneurship and emerging as the winner.

An Accounts Payable Associate needs creativity in setting the pace for the organization on the policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of their enterprise against their competitors leading to the growth of the business and the income.

Results Orientation:

Results Orientation is knowing and focusing on outstanding results and working hard to achieve them because they are significant.

An Accounts Payable Associate must understand and make it clear to the employees how important results are and the competitive and results driven market that the company is facing while encouraging them to remain focused on the results that every project bears without fail.

Financial Management:

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 Accounts Payable Associate 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.

Diversity Awareness:

Diversity Awareness is the understanding that people are different and unique in their particular way and respecting their uniqueness.

An Accounts Payable Associate ought to successfully identify the various types of diversity presented in his company to be able to benefit from these individual differences in the hope of improving the success of his team and encourage the team members to become aware of these qualities and use them appropriately.

Training others:

Training is the ability to expand the knowledge base by learning new truths that are useful in the workplace.

An Accounts Payable Associate needs to creatively schedule training for his employees in a focused manner that will allow the employee stay useful in the workplace and get new knowledge so that both the business and the worker not suffer from delays and work related stress.

Hard Skills Required to be an Accounts Payable Associate

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 accounts payable associate should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

Accounts Payable Associate: Hard skills list

Accounting
Accounts Payable
Accounts Receivable
Account Reconciliation
Administrative
Analysis
Analytical
Bookkeeping
Clerical
Communication
Computer
Customer Service
Data Entry
Finance
Invoicing
Education and Training
MS Office
MS Word
Mathematics
QuickBooks
Reporting

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