Accounting Manager job description

Finance & accounting — Accounting Manager
Runs the monthly close and the accountants who deliver it.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Core Accounting
- Journal Entries and Accruals — You can set the journal approval rules and thresholds for the team, and fix the recurring causes of late or wrong entries.
- Account Reconciliation — You can set the reconciliation standard for every balance sheet account, with owners, deadlines and thresholds, and make sure it holds under audit.
- Accounts Payable Processing — You can fix recurring payables problems such as duplicate payments, late approvals or missing purchase orders, and keep vendor master data under control.
- Accounts Receivable and Collections — You can estimate how much of the money customers owe will not be collected, using the aging report and customer history, and resolve disputed invoices with sales and the customer.
- Fixed Asset and Depreciation Accounting — You can reconcile the register to the ledger, run a physical verification, and flag assets that may be impaired.

Close & Reporting
- Month-End Close Management — You can run the close across several entities and shorten it without losing accuracy, by fixing the steps that cause late adjustments.
- Financial Statement Preparation — You can prepare a full set of financial statements, including the cash flow statement, and check they tie back to the ledger and each other.
- GAAP and IFRS Application — You can research how the standards treat a complex or unusual transaction and write a technical memo with a conclusion.
- Revenue Recognition — You can review non-standard contracts, identify each separate promise to the customer (a performance obligation), and split the price between them.
- Consolidation and Intercompany Accounting — You can prepare the group consolidation, including eliminations and currency translation, and explain the adjustments.

Controls & Audit
- Financial Controls and Segregation of Duties — You can design controls for a process, including separation of duties in a small team, and fix a control weakness when one is found.
- Audit Readiness and Auditor Liaison — You can coordinate audit requests across the team, prepare the summary schedules for each audit area, and resolve the adjustments the auditors propose.
- ERP and General Ledger Administration — You can manage user access and period locks, fix integration errors between the ledger and other systems, and test changes before they go live.
- Chart of Accounts Design — You can request and set up new accounts or dimensions correctly, and keep the chart free of duplicates and unused codes.

Tax & Treasury
- Sales Tax and VAT Compliance — You can work out the tax treatment of new products, customers or locations, and fix errors through the proper correction process.
- Corporate Tax Provision and Filing Support — You can prepare supporting schedules such as fixed asset and expense analyses for the tax computation.
- Cash Flow Forecasting and Treasury — You can build a rolling 13-week cash forecast, manage bank accounts and payment approvals, and warn early of a cash shortfall.

Planning & Analysis
- Annual Budget Building — You can run the budget process for a business area, tie revenue, headcount and costs together, and present it for approval.
- Rolling Forecasts and Reforecasting — You can run the monthly reforecast for a business area and flag risks and opportunities against the plan.
- Budget Variance Analysis — You can analyze variances across a business area, including price, volume and mix effects, and agree actions with budget holders.
- Financial Modeling in Excel — You can build a three-statement or investment model with scenarios and sensitivities, and document its assumptions.
- Finance Business Partnering — You can support a business area as its finance partner, bringing analysis to its decisions and challenging spend that does not pay back.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in areas where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, time, and the effort needed to keep them working.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were never involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.