Staff Accountant job description

Finance & accounting — Staff Accountant
Posts journals, reconciles accounts and supports the monthly close.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it.
- Prepare recurring journals such as accruals, prepayments or payroll for your area unaided with their calculation and support.
- Reconcile your balance sheet accounts including payroll control each month and clear differences to source.
- Run the payables cycle for your entities, including payment runs, vendor statement reconciliations and supplier queries.
- Manage collections for a group of customers, agree payment plans within limits, and prepare the aging report (who owes what, and for how long) with notes on each problem account.
- Stay responsible after you hand work over.

REQUIREMENTS
- No earlier level needed: this is the first level of the ladder

REQUIRED SKILLS
Core Accounting
- Journal Entries and Accruals — You can prepare recurring journals such as accruals, prepayments or payroll for your area unaided with their calculation and support.
- Account Reconciliation — You can reconcile your balance sheet accounts including payroll control each month and clear differences to source.
- Accounts Payable Processing — You can run the payables cycle for your entities, including payment runs, vendor statement reconciliations and supplier queries.
- Accounts Receivable and Collections — You can manage collections for a group of customers, agree payment plans within limits, and prepare the aging report (who owes what, and for how long) with notes on each problem account.
- Fixed Asset and Depreciation Accounting — You can add new assets to the fixed asset register from approved invoices and run the monthly depreciation report.

Close & Reporting
- Month-End Close Management — You can complete your tasks on the close checklist by their deadline and say early when something will be late.
- Financial Statement Preparation — You can pull a trial balance and prepare supporting schedules for the financial statements from a template.
- GAAP and IFRS Application — You can follow the team's accounting policies for routine transactions and ask when something does not fit them.
- Revenue Recognition — You can record revenue for standard invoices and track deferred revenue on a schedule someone else built.
- Consolidation and Intercompany Accounting — You can record intercompany charges on the agreed schedule and send the balance confirmations to the other entity.
- Management Reporting and Finance KPIs — You can refresh a management report from the ledger using a template, and check that its totals match the trial balance.

Controls & Audit
- Financial Controls and Segregation of Duties — You can perform the controls assigned to you, such as approvals and checks, and keep evidence that they were done.
- Audit Readiness and Auditor Liaison — You can pull documents and samples the auditors ask for and file them where the team can find them.
- ERP and General Ledger Administration — You can use the accounting system for your daily work and run its standard reports correctly.
- 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 check that invoices show the right tax code and rate, and gather the figures needed for a tax return.
- 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 record daily bank balances and update the cash position report.
- Financial Risk Management — You can log a financial risk that a colleague reports, such as a late payment or a currency exposure, in the risk register.

Planning & Analysis
- Annual Budget Building — You can collect budget submissions from managers into the budget template and check they add up.
- 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 produce a budget versus actual report and highlight the largest differences.
- Financial Modeling — You can update an existing model's inputs and check the outputs move the way you expect.
- Finance Business Partnering — You can answer a budget holder's question about a transaction or a report line.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep your own tasks and deadlines in a current to-do list, and tell your manager as soon as work you own will be late.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate how long a task will take once the approach is clear, and you say promptly when the estimate turns out to be wrong.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can stay responsible after you hand work over: you check it did what it was meant to, fix your own mistakes, and give updates before anyone asks.
- Quality Focus — You can choose checks that suit the task in front of you, catch your own mistakes before anyone else sees them, and confirm the result works once people start using it.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can work out what is wrong in work you did not create, and you fix the underlying cause instead of working around the symptom.
- Domain Expertise — You can apply the basics of your field to the work you are given, and ask an expert when a task goes beyond what you have learned.
- 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 your work so your team can act on it, and play a request back in your own words before you act on it.
- Collaboration — You can work well with people in other roles, share context and credit, and take criticism of your work without defending territory.
- Writing & Documentation — You can document your own work well enough for a colleague to follow it unaided, such as a how-to guide or a handover, and keep it current as things change.
- Stakeholder Management — You can keep your manager and immediate team informed of your progress, and you raise an issue before someone else discovers it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can act on direction well, seek feedback on how you work, and be open about what you need help with.
- Mentoring — You can share what you have just learned with your peers and help a newer colleague find their way around.
- Strategic Thinking — You can explain why the work you were given matters and who it is for.