Senior Accountant job description

Finance & accounting — Senior Accountant
Owns parts of the month-end close and reviews other accountants' work.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Core Accounting
- Journal Entries and Accruals — You can work out the right entries for unusual transactions, and review other accountants' journals for errors before they post.
- Account Reconciliation — You can review reconciliations prepared by others, challenge old or unsupported items, and fix the process that keeps creating them.
- 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 own a section of the close, such as payables and accruals, and hand it over complete and reviewed.
- Financial Statement Preparation — You can prepare monthly management accounts from the trial balance, with a short explanation of the main movements.
- GAAP and IFRS Application — You can apply the standards correctly to the transactions in your area and look up the rule when a case is new to you.
- Revenue Recognition — You can maintain deferred revenue and unbilled revenue schedules, and recognize revenue on standard contracts correctly each month.
- Consolidation and Intercompany Accounting — You can record intercompany charges on the agreed schedule and send the balance confirmations to the other entity.

Controls & Audit
- Financial Controls and Segregation of Duties — You can test whether controls in your area are working and report the ones that are skipped or ineffective.
- Audit Readiness and Auditor Liaison — You can prepare the audit schedules for your area and answer auditors' questions on them accurately and on time.
- ERP and General Ledger Administration — You can maintain master data such as vendors, customers and cost centers, and build your own reports in the system.
- Chart of Accounts Design — You can find the right account and cost center for a transaction using the chart of accounts guide.

Tax & Treasury
- Sales Tax and VAT Compliance — You can prepare indirect tax returns for your entities, reconcile them to the ledger, and file them on time.
- Corporate Tax Provision and Filing Support — You can collect the ledger data and schedules the tax advisers request for the annual return.
- Cash Flow Forecasting and Treasury — You can prepare a weekly cash forecast from receivables, payables and payroll, and explain why last week's forecast differed from what actually happened.

Planning & Analysis
- Annual Budget Building — You can build the budget for a set of cost centers with their owners, challenging assumptions that look out of line.
- Rolling Forecasts and Reforecasting — You can update a forecast template with each month's actual results once someone has explained the process.
- Budget Variance Analysis — You can explain the main variances in your area from the underlying transactions, separating timing differences from real overspend.
- Financial Modeling in Excel — You can build a simple model for a question such as a price change or new hire, with inputs, calculations and outputs kept separate.
- Finance Business Partnering — You can answer a budget holder's question about a transaction or a report line.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into manageable pieces, weigh the options against evidence, and explain the tradeoff you chose.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.