This post provides important skills and qualities you need to have to be successful in your accounts receivable coordinator career, which you can also apply in making your resume or CV.
Before diving in, let’s learn who an accounts receivable coordinator is:
Who is an Accounts Receivable Coordinator?
An accounts receivable coordinator is an employee in an organization whose job is to manager the various customer accounts to ensure prompt payments, record account changes, and resolve billing and payment errors.
15 Accounts Receivable Coordinator Skills
- Good knowledge of accounting
It is important that an accounts receivable coordinator is well grounded in the principles of accounting, at least to a satisfactory level.
An accounts receivable coordinator should be able to do some basic accounting tasks.
The reason is that, in the course of this job, you will need to do some necessary recording of transactions in a way that any other person in the organization should understand with little or no help whatever.
To do this will demand some good accounting skills.
Also, for the purpose of report writing, which you know is important when making presentations during auditing processes, basic accounting skills will be needed to present a comprehensive report with little or no complexities whatever.
2. Proficiency with accounts receivable processes
This is basically developing some basic skills to help tackle your job description.
The job you have at hand demands basic and advanced technical know-how for you to be able to handle or execute it.
First, you have to understand what is needed from you before you get to work.
To be efficient in this job, you should be familiar with the whole accounts receivable processes involved in this job.
This should take you back into studying your job description all over again in case you have forgotten.
So, to be sure that you are doing what you are asked to do, you should be sure that you know the details of your job and what the processes of the job entail.
This will help you know where and how to channel your strength in your job.
3. Attention to details
Paying attention to details is one of the biggest favors you can do for yourself in this job.
You should know that details are very important in every job description.
This is because it is on the basis of the details you have that you can work with.
There is no doubt that there is the odd temptation of trying to overlook some details in this job basically because you might think that the details are not necessary.
All you need to do is to ensure that you are adept with all the processes of the job and some of the details you have at your disposal.
Taking notice of every detail in this job will help you jump over the hurdle of errors and assumptions.
These are the two things that may try to take the place of attention to details but it is your duty to ensure that no detail is left out in any transaction.
4. Data entry skills
One of the resources you will be provided with in this job is the computer and other data processing gadgets that will be of great help to you in the course of executing this job.
It is given to you to increase your efficiency with timeliness as a factor.
When these gadgets are provided for you, the purpose of the provision is to help you increase your efficiency in the job and also to help you meet up with deadlines and make your job quite easier.
These gadgets if used well can help you achieve the aims of their provision.
So when you are provided with these gadgets (computer and other digital gadgets), the next thing you should think of having in your arsenal is the data entry skills.
This is one way that you are able to keep a track record of the financial happenings in the department and the organization at large.
5. Good communication skills
Handling the accounts receivable coordinator role demands a lot of communication skills from you, starting with your colleagues in the office to the various clients/customers of the organization where you work on daily basis.
First is that you have to establish efficient communication with the people in the organization to properly notify them and give a good account of your job in the organization.
This is very important, as with it you are able to give a good account of your job.
Secondly, you have to establish communication with the various customers of the organization through phone calls, social media chats, and other means that you can employ to reach out to the various customers of the organization where you work.
6. Administrative skills
Coordination has a lot to do with administrative abilities. To coordinate simply means to put things in order and ensure that order is maintained which will definitely bring you to the importance of having some good administrative skills.
When you are working with the portfolio of an accounts receivable coordinator, it is expected that you have some good administrative skills which should help you exercise some control and coordination in the accounts receivable department.
The summary of this point is that if you are to function effectively in this job, you should be able to put activities inside the department under control with the view of dealing with time and energy wastage.
7. Analytical skills
Having analytical skills is not only for auditors or people in a similar job.
It is a skill that cuts across every form of job opportunity you might come across, it’s a skill you will need to really bail yourself out of some difficult situations you may find yourself in your job.
You need this skill every day and every moment you spend doing this job.
Analytical skills help you analyze documents and try to search out irregularities and also help to correct the abnormalities.
So, the first step to doing this is through good analytical skills.
Apart from the financial documents in your possession, it is also important you analyze the direction the group or organization is going.
This will definitely help to change the financial direction of the organization if found to be faulty.
8. Relationship building
Do you know that the strength of your relationship with people is one of the factors that determine how far you can go in this job?
This is not to say that 100% of your success can be attributed to this, but it one of the leverages you have to succeed in this job.
When you build meaningful and business oriented relationships, you are bound to gain more useful knowledge about what you don’t literally know how to do even in the organization.
You need to be intentional and purposeful in your relationship with people both inside and outside the organization.
One thing that can help you build meaningful relationships in this job is “teachability”.
It is not safe for you to assume that you have it all in you to succeed without the little contributions that come from friends and colleagues in the workplace.
9. Supervisory skills
This is one of the major things you should brace yourself to do all the time in the accounts receivable department.
It is also important to know that only few people end up doing what is expected of them when there is no proper supervision.
This is because some workers may have some bad or negative attitude towards their job and can abandon their jobs momentarily just to engage in other activities.
When you allow such a thing happen, it can really affect the productivity of the department.
It is important that you are in hand to attend to issues like this. Keep some watchful eyes over the people you are working with to ensure that there is no place for laziness or any form of nonchalant attitude towards work like lateness to work and other unacceptable attitudes to work.
10. Team building/coaching
It is one of your responsibilities to develop the members of your team for them to come up to a level of consistency in their jobs.
This is very important to the growth and advancement of the department and the organization at large.
So, what does it imply?
This implies that you have to transform yourself into a coach who is able to teach the team what the job demands and what is expected from each and every individual in the department.
Coaching in this case could be on individual or group basis.
Whatever method you decide to employ, be sure that the goal of the coaching or team building is to make the department function at full capacity.
This means that you should coach the staff of the department until there is stability and consistency in their job.
11. Management skills
An accounts receivable coordinator is also regarded as one of the leading figures in the department who takes part in the management of events, activities, and most importantly the staffs of the department.
He/she is a coach and someone who could lead the pack (department).
As someone who is expected to lead in the department, one of the skills you must have is the management skills.
You will need to manage the people you are leading as well as resources given to you to help you execute your job without problems.
So, management skills will be important to you to be able to handle the people that are working with you.
You will need to find a way to get the best out of those people and give them room to develop their craft into something pleasant and desirable.
12. Report writing
Writing reports is an important aspect of your job which you cannot afford to ignore.
Through reports, you are able to explain and present thorough details of the operation of the organization.
It is one of the ways that the organization can understand the movement of money into its coffers.
If this is the case, then it means that the report should be written in a way that whoever goes through the report will need little or no help whatever in understanding the contents of the report.
The report should be explicitly simple to read and understand.
To achieve this, you should learn the art of report writing and avoid the use of ambiguous terms which does not allow clarity in the explanation of some transaction details contained in the report you have written for the department.
13. Time management
Time management is of great essence to every organization. It is a very big factor that determines how much the organization can achieve within a given timeframe.
That is why anyone who desires to work in a prestigious organization must have time management as a basic skill.
To manage time as an accounts receivable coordinator entails making most of every minute and hour of the day to make sure you achieve something worthwhile.
You cannot afford to fold your arms doing nothing when you have a lot to do.
This amounts to laziness and an exhibition of nonchalant attitude towards your job.
What happens to people when they fail to be up and doing in their job is that with time they are replaced.
This is something you don’t want to experience, so you have to manage your time well when in the organization.
14. Computer skills
There is a major shift in the way jobs are done in this era and only people who have reinvented themselves to match this change seem to survive the trend in its entirety.
That trend is the use of computer or automated systems to do major jobs in most industries today.
At a time like this, one sure way of making yourself irrelevant is to have analog skills when digital skills are taking over the whole business world.
You either reinvent yourself or get left behind in the future of the business world.
So, it is up to you to decide which side of the business divide you will belong to.
Gaining computer skills should be an intentional act from you. This means that computer skills are not learnt out of reflex.
You have to intentionally decide to learn some technologies that are necessary for you to succeed in your job.
Learn more and you will be able to compete with the best in whatever field you find yourself.
15. Good customer relationship
A good and formidable relationship with customers/clients of the organization remains one of the most important skills you can boast of as an accounts receivable coordinator.
You are somehow like a link between the organization and clients out there.
In the course of having some transactions with the clients of the organization, it is important that you do not for any reason give clients a reason to be unsatisfied with your manner of approach or method of doing your thing.
This could raise a problem in the long run.
Therefore, when you are in contact with the clients of the organization, be a good representative of the organization and don’t give them a reason to seek for other alternatives.
If this happens, then it is the fortune of the organization you are toying with.
Accounts Receivable Coordinator Skills for Resume
If you are making a resume or CV for the accounts receivable coordinator role, then you can apply some of the skills and qualities presented above that you have in your resume.
This will show that you have the needed skills to perform the duties and responsibilities of an accounts receivable coordinator effectively, which can boost your chances of being hired for the position.
Conclusion
One of the basic duties of an accounts receivable coordinator is to manage customer accounts to ensure that payments are prompt and also to record the necessary transactions.
So, working in this capacity entails having a direct relationship with the customers of the organization.
This post has provided some of the most important skills and qualities an accounts receivable coordinator needs to develop to be effective in their career.
You can also highlight these skills in the core competence section of your resume when making one for the accounts receivable coordinator role to show to the hiring manager that you have the required skills to be success on the job.