Top 15 Accounts Officer Skills to Stay Top of Your Job

As an accounts officer, you will need to have certain skills and qualities to be effective in performing the duties of your job and be successful in your career.

This post provides important skills and qualities you need to develop to have a great accounts officer career:   

Who is an Accounts Officer?

An accounts officer is tasked with the duty of managing the financial bookkeeping of a business organization.

This involves processing invoices, recording payments and tracking the expenses in the organization.

Top 15 Accounts Officer Skills and Qualities

Here are top 15 accounts officer skills and qualities for a successful career:

1. Interpersonal Skills

Relationship in the workplace is of vital importance to all parties involved.

This is to say that interpersonal skills are of great benefit to you as much as it is of great importance to your fellow employees in the workplace.

It is the bedrock of the relationship you will need in the workplace.

Working in an organization with little or no interpersonal skills at all makes your job a lot harder than you can image.

How do you intend to cope in your job if you don’t have what it takes to relate well with other stakeholders in the organization?

So, that relationship must be there whether with people performing similar functions as you or others performing at different capacities.

The bottom line is that you need to build that relationship with all necessary stakeholders in the organization.

2. Proficiency with Excel

This is for the purpose of accuracy, efficiency, and time management.

You should be able to boast of having some good IT skills as an accounts officer. You should be good with Microsoft Excel and other related software.

You know that Excel is good and suitable software to handle accounting matters.

That is why you should get this skill up your sleeves and allow it make a big impact in your job.

This does not in any way reduce your natural efficiency in the job.

So, for the purpose of time management, efficiency, and accuracy, Excel and other similar software tools are there for your personal use and advancement.

It is your chance to make sure that you give your job your best shot and whatever it takes to succeed in your job.

3. Great Analytical Skills

Any job that has to do with accounting has great analytical skills as one of the basic skills you will need to have to succeed in it.

This is because as long as you are in the position to manipulate figures, there is always the need to be analytical when doing so.

That is why this skill must be down in you to be able to manipulate figures with little or no errors at all.

No one wants to be associated with errors, so analytical skill is what you need to deal with error issues.

You also have to be good at taking your time to analyze whatever is made available to you to work with by the organization, especially financial documents that contain the financial operations or transactions of the organization.

You need to study the documents and know what to do with them.

4. Detail-oriented

Towards the end of the last point, you could see that certainly there is a need to always pay attention to the documents given to you by your organization to work with.

This is basically for the purpose of decision making.

But first you will need to be eagle-eyed for you to be able to know what the different information in those documents mean and what they are meant to accomplish in your job.

You must pay attention to those details because in them is what you need for your job.

So, the summary of this point is that every detail is important, not minding the size or how you view it.

Therefore, you are expected to study documents made available to you and try to know if there are information that are well balanced and fix them up.

5. Basic Accounting Skills

Being an accounts officer gives you the responsibility of managing the financial bookkeeping of the organization.

You are in charge of maintaining accounts and ensuring that records are prepared and preserved for future use.

Therefore, you are to know your basic accounting skills and even some advanced knowledge of accounting.

This is why every day you should keep yourself up to date with the latest accounting skills and know where those skills fit in in your job.

Accounting skills like bookkeeping are very important to organizations because they tend to help maintain an accurate record of financial transactions of the organization, which forms the basis of evaluation and decision making process of the organization.

6. Time Management

Any employee who is not adept with the principles of time management is sure to make a mess of their job in no time.

This applies to you also. You have to know that whatever you want to do or you are expected to do comes with a time tag.

That time tag is all you have to accomplish your task either for the day or for other timeframes.

The bottom line remains that managing your time well is the only way to avoid adding more problems to your work.

Not to forget also that time management works hand in hand with strict and strategic planning.

When you know what your job for the day is, the next thing is to sit down and carry out some good planning on how to execute each job without wasting time.

7. Openness

As an accounts officer, you must be open to new and innovative ideas relating to your job.

You don’t have to stick only to what you know; rather you have to allow contributions and criticism to be part of what you entertain in your job.

Constructive criticism helps a lot in this job.

You need to hear what other people have to say about you in your job.

You may be doing one or two things wrong which you may not be aware of.

It is when you are open to criticisms and advice that you will be able to know where to make amends.

Perfection in your job is one of the things you want to accomplish and you want to make a big impression on your boss for them to consider you for promotion.

If that’s what you have in mind, then you should be open to new ideas as well as criticism where and when necessary.

8. Adaptability

At every point in time, bear it in mind that things are bound to change whether you are prepared for it or not.

When you settle this in your mind, the next thing is to put yourself in the position to adapt to this change whether you see it as something negative or positive.

You have to add more skills and more knowledge to help you adapt to any new development in the organization.

One of the changes that might occur in the organization is when its management decides to automate some processes in the organization.

In this case, the only option left for you is to acquire the necessary IT skills to help you stay relevant in the organization or risk losing out entirely.

9. Creativity

When working in an organization, there is no law that bans you from employing new and improved methodologies to your job except it is clearly against the rules and regulations obtainable in the organization.

Otherwise you are to decide you want to make your job easy for you.

On that basis, creativity is one of the basic skills you need as an accounts officer. You are to do things with different but more efficient and effective methods best suited to you.

Again, ensure that whatever method you want to use is not against the rules and regulations of the organization.

If you do what works best for you, then you will discover that you will find your job to be interesting and fun.

If you are able to employ some technologies to your job, then you would make your work easier and more fun and you will ever remain effective and efficient in your job.

10. Motivation

There are a lot of things that tend to weaken the productivity of most employees in organizations. One of those factors is lack of motivation.

Lack of motivation can make you even when you have a good salary yet you are not comfortable or spurred to do better.

On the other hand, a motivated employee enjoys doing what they know how to do best regardless of the challenges they might be facing at work.

This is to say that motivation lifts your spirit far beyond the challenges you face in your workplace.

The appetite to succeed is one of the factors that helps keep your motivation high.

Let the appetite to succeed and make a name for yourself in your organization remain your driving force and in no time you will no longer see those challenges as problems but as stepping stones to greater achievements.

11. Communication Skills

Lacking communication skills in the organization is one of the ways you can make life difficult for yourself in the job you are doing.

It is not because you might not be good at what you do but because the job you are doing demands a lot of communication.

So, first you have to understand that communication plays a vital role in your job and without it, your job becomes more difficult and complex.

You need to disseminate information and you also need information to know the roadmap of the job.

It is important you know how to communicate verbally and also in written form.

Some information are best disseminated orally while some for official purposes will need to be put down in writing for future reference and decision making.

12. Commercial Awareness

How far do you know the business world? Locking up yourself in the office is not what really shows how good you are in your job.

You need to upgrade yourself with all the happenings in the business world.

You need to know how businesses are run and maintained because you can’t be sure about the next job you might be handling, be it in the same organization or in another.

You will need to get some good trainings and enlightenment about how businesses work so that you will be able to understand the brain behind some financial transactions and habits of the organization where you work.

If you don’t know this, then you are not yet ready to progress in your job.

Your basic job though is to keep record of all the financial accounts of the organization you work for, but for your personal advancement and understanding of how your organization works, you will need sufficient business or commercial awareness to comprehend that.

13. Integrity

Keeping the financial records of your organization is sure to be a sensitive job for you to handle. It is a job your integrity is put to the test almost on daily basis.

Your employer is very interested to know how you handle this job in regards to integrity.

Your employer or boss will honestly like you to be sincere and hiding nothing from them when it comes to the financial matters of the organization.

They don’t want to hear you talk but want you to be truthful with no covet agenda whatever.

So, this is where you put yourself under control and ensure that you don’t tempt yourself into carrying out some illegal practices that are against the financial rules and regulations of the organization.

This can ultimately lead to your dismissal.

14. Resilience

Never minding the juicy and lucrative salary you might be earning in this capacity, one thing is sure and that is the fact that pressure arises with time both to meet up with deadlines and other activities demanding your attention all the time.

This can be tiring and exhausting. The increase in responsibilities given to you by the organization which you know are enshrined in your job description is the beginning of the whole pressure, because it demands both your physical and mental stress.

You may not be able to avoid all the stress and mental demands but you can sure push through and still remain effective and relevant as an accounts officer.

It might be difficult but not entirely impossible to deal with stress and other negating factors in your job.

15. Relationship Building

As you know, the type of relationship you build in the organization is one of the factors that go a long way to determine what you can expect in your job on daily basis.

If you have toxic relationship with other people in the organization, it is sure to affect your output generally.

So, you should try and build good and long-lasting relationships in the organization.

A large chunk of your success in the workplace depends on the type of relationship that exists between you and other people in the workplace.

If you are able to build a working relationship with all the necessary stakeholders in the organization, then they will do their best to help you adapt to any change that comes in and also help you make your job lighter and easier.

So, start building that relationship today.

Accounts Officer Skills for Resume

The skills above are so important that you can’t afford to leave them out in your resume.

A good resume should contain the above skillsets to show that you are the best bet for the job.

These skillsets should actually be a thorough reflection of your capabilities.

Conclusion

As the accounts officer of an organization, your basic responsibilities are to process invoices, record payments, and track the expenses in the organization.

This post has provided in-depth list of some of the important skills and qualities an accounts officer needs to have to be effective in their job.

They can also apply the above skills and qualities in their resumes or CVs to effectively show to recruiters/employers that they will be successful in carrying out their duties as an accounts officer.