If you are making a resume or CV for an accounts payable coordinator role, you need to highlight the major skills needed for success on the job in your resume to increase your chances of being hired.
This post has provided a list of important skills you need to have to be effective on the job as an accounts payable coordinator, which you can also apply in making a resume for the position.
But before we dive into them, let’s get to know who an accounts payable coordinator is.
Who is an Accounts Payable Coordinator?
One can say that an accounts payable coordinator is an accounts payable officer in the organization, whose duty is to process and disburse cash out from the organization with the exception of the company’s payroll.
He/she is also involved in the preparation of the company’s bookkeeping functions.
Top 15 Accounts Payable Coordinator Skills
The skills you need to be successful in your job as an accounts payable coordinator, which you can also apply in making your resume include:
- Communication Skills
There are a lot of reasons to think of communication as a key asset you have in this job.
First is that by the nature of your job, which involves disbursement of cash or controlling the cash flow out of the organization, there is need to maintain proper communication within and outside the organization.
To establish a firm control over the outflow of cash in the organization, you should be able to keep in touch with the necessary stakeholders in the organization to ensure that they are aware of what you are doing.
This is for example necessary for those of them who work in the accounting department to help maintain a good track of cash outflow in the organization.
So, proper relationship should be maintained in the organization for this purpose through effective communication.
2. Attention to Details
Negligence of some vital details has been the undoing of so many people in various walks of life.
This is so true because of the hustling and bustling we experience every day in the business world.
Sometimes, we tend to overlook some things which most times turn out to be important.
Though this can be traced to how busy you can be related to the nature of your job, yet it is necessary for you to be able to pay attention to every detail you come across in this job.
Remember, the detail you may deem minute and insignificant could go the other way round.
In the course of performing your duties as an accounts payable coordinator, you will be working with cash related documents and these contain figures you are to work with.
This is where you need to pay utmost attention and concentrate to make sure that you commit no mistake while working with those documents.
3. Organizational Skills
Sure enough in this job, you have a lot of things to do, a lot of decisions to make, and a lot of things to draw the rule on.
Quite not easy but not optional in any way, you have accepted the terms and conditions of this job and so should be able to continue.
The main worry is, how do you handle the various tasks you have at hand and the ones coming in thick and fast?
The answer is quite simple and straightforward: through good organizational skills. This is what you will need to make light your job.
Organizational skills imply having the knowledge and ability to control the activities meted out for you by the organization, whether numerous or few.
Some of these activities come in thick and fast in some days and in other days they could be few.
Either way, you should be able to put all the activities under control.
4. Technical Abilities
Technical abilities of an account payable coordinator are the basic day to day activities to be carried out by them.
This is to say, for you to have good technical abilities as an accounts payable coordinator, you should be able to carry out the basic day to day job designated for you.
Technical abilities could also entail doing what you know how to do best with utmost excellence, and that should be a differentiating factor between you and other competitors for same job out there.
You should be able to do what you do with utmost excellence.
This is all about you and not the department where you belong.
You should know that you should be able to train yourself well to do this job better than most of your counterparts in the organization.
This is what makes you competent and a useful asset in the organization where you work.
5. Teamwork
Nothing gives you more leverage in your job as an accounts payable coordinator more than having the right people with you as a team.
The impact is always encouraging and could be what you need to make it to the top of the ladder in your job.
When you work with a team of fellow professionals, you stand a chance of learning from their expertise and combining their knowledge with yours to do extraordinary things in your job.
You need to value the members of your team.
Also, if you are working with less knowledgeable group of people in your team, they can be of benefit to you.
They may not contribute mentally but could help out in terms of physical involvements.
You can delegate some duties to them and free yourself of stress.
6. Relationship Building
This is an aspect of teamwork that you should know. The strength of your team should be based on the strength of your relationship with the individual members of the team.
So, you must be intentional in your relationship with people inside the organization for the sake of your job.
Build relationship with the right people and with the right motive. This is one way to get some leverage to help you excel in this job.
When you build intentional relationships, one thing is sure and that is improvement in your job through some good advice and help that you may obtain from other people in the organization.
So be intentional in building relationship and make friends with people that are relevant to your job.
7. Management Skills
Coordination is majorly management based. It is important to know this and work on your management skills.
You should be able to put things in order and make sure you exercise control over the activities you are expected to oversee in the organization.
You have activities to put into control and also people to manage.
These entails being aware of the structure of the organization or the department and ensure that you direct the activities of other team members to achieve the organizational goals.
So, management is one skill you should boast of as an accounts payable coordinator of any organization.
Also, you should be able to manage the resources and the people in your team for the purpose of lifting the fortunes of the organization.
8. Administrative Skills
Administration is the organization and arrangement of related activities in the organization.
This is one necessary skill you must possess to be effective in the role of an accounts payable coordinator in the organization where you work.
The end point of administration is to ensure that there is an organized system and method of doing things in the organization bearing in mind the short and long term goals of the organization in question.
The activities are some of the things that should be taken into account if the goals of the organization are to be achieved.
So, as an accounts payable coordinator, you should be able to put things in order even the simplest of activities and make sure you are on hand to make necessary amendments to activities if need be.
9. Collaborative Skills
One of the ways to add experience to your already impressive abilities is to collaborate with relevant stakeholders in the organization, as well as other people who might necessarily be of help to you and your job.
You collaborate with them and get the best ideas from them.
This brings us back to the importance of relationship building.
It is not possible to get the best out of these aforementioned set of people without first building and maintaining a good relationship with them.
It is totally an impossible feat to achieve.
When you build this relationship, the next thing to do is to get closer and work with them to ensure that you get the best ideas from them at all times.
Their advice and guidance is definitely going to be priceless to you in this job.
So, collaboration is quite effective in this job.
10. Evaluative Skills
When working in a large organization where you are one of the key decision makers, one thing you should learn how to do is to learn how to engage in effective evaluation of the system prevalent in the organization (in case you are new to the job).
You should be able to also evaluate yourself and the activities you are engaged in.
You don’t need to neglect the importance of self-evaluation at all. You must keep track of your activities and know if you are doing enough or not.
11. Monitoring Skills
This is part of your evaluative skills. You work with people in the organization and these different people have different tendencies when left alone to do their jobs all by themselves without proper or strict supervision.
This in some cases can indict your position in the organization.
So, to avoid indicting your position as the accounts payable coordinator of your organization, ensure that you always keep a watchful eye over the activities of the people working under you in the organization.
This is important and not something you should take lightly.
You need to understand that people sometimes do eye service and sometimes may abandon the job given to them as long as you are not there.
Therefore, you have to device a means to ensure that whether you are there or not, your team does what they should do at all times.
12. Coaching Skills
Coaching is a necessary skill in this job. Being a leader in that department or the organization at large puts you in a position where you need to transfer some of the knowledge and experience you have to the members of your team.
You are to be a coach who can discuss the nature of the job and orient the team on some tips that can help them do the job effectively.
It is important because the reality in working in an organization is far more surprising and tasking than whatever anyone has read in school.
So, you find yourself in a position to ease them into their jobs, especially if you are dealing with new intakes in the department.
They depend on you for direction and somehow look up to you to know what to do if they ever have any sort of challenge while executing their jobs.
13. Advisory Skills
Sound advice is one of the things that is expected of you as the accounts payable coordinator of the organization.
Your role does not just start and end with your department. You should be able to extend your expertise to the organization generally.
How you do this is through professional presentation of your ideas to other necessary stakeholders in the organization.
You should be able to lend your voice, your strength and your expertise at the top level to all those who are concerned and are in a position to implement your suggestions.
Before arriving at the point of making suggestions, you should be sure that you have researched and made some good findings in regards to what is obtainable in the world out there.
Also, though you might be coming up with new ideas, be sure that the chances of such ideas workings are sky high and not too risky to implement or work with.
14. Motivation
You can’t think of success in your job if you lack motivation. It is near impossible because when you are motivated, you see a lot of positivity even when it seems not to be in view.
This is what you stand to achieve when you stay positive and motivated.
Your motivation must go beyond what is obtainable in the organization.
It should not be tied down to what the organization offers. Though this is what motivates a lot of people in their jobs, however, unless you get motivated beyond what your organization offers, you may soon have a reason to quit the job.
In the course of your job, you may encounter a million reasons to quit in the long run but motivation gives you just one good reason why you should continue despite all odds.
So, believe it that it is a factual fact that without motivation, you may not accomplish much in this job.
15. Goal Oriented
Purposelessness is one thing you should be able to run away from in this job.
You should be careful not to handle activities as they come without being intentional about why you are engaging yourself in those activities.
You should set your goals right and be disciplined enough to work towards achieving them.
Achieving excellence in your job is not a rocket science but a product of targeted and well channeled energy towards achieving a desired goal, be it from the organization or the goal you set for yourself.
The most important thing is for you to make sure that you are intentional about what you do daily in the organization.
Lastly, be realistic with your personal goals. Don’t allow it to put you at loggerheads with the relevant stakeholders in the organization.
This means that you do not disrupt the routine activities in the organization all in the name of achieving your own goals.
Conclusion
As an accounts payable coordinator, you are part of the department of the organization which is involved in the handling of most of the disbursement and management of cash outflow from the organization for various purposes.
However, everything is not down to what you might have been taught in school. You will need to have some requisite and practical skills to be able to function well in this capacity and that is what this article has been able to achieve to this end.
