6 Staff Accountants (1-2 Yrs Exp.) Interview Questions That Are Frequently Asked

hey guys welcome to another video today we'll be discussing six interview questions for staff accountants and staff accountants typically have experience between one and two years and so in the past we've covered the interview questions for a junior accountant the difference between a junior and a staff accountant is that a junior accountant is someone who's just starting out fresh out of college without experience with a staff accountant you have some experience so it could be six months a year up to two years sometimes so this is the basic difference between junior and staff accountant i'll link up here to the junior accountant interview questions and let's dive into today's video talking about the staff accountant interview questions if you're new here welcome welcome my name is bill hannah i'm the financial controller i'm a licensed cpa in the great state of new york and i have over 15 years of experience in the field of finance where i started out at pricewaterhousecoopers as an auditor and then i transitioned out to private industry and then i worked my way up from a financial analyst position all the way up to a corporate controller position which is what i do today and this channel is all about giving you the summary or the juice of my experience over the last decade and a half and i do this here in the youtube channel as well as on my website through blog posts an online course and templates so go ahead and check that out as well before we dive into today's questions i want to give a huge shout out to my first patron on patreon alicia d welcome to the group alicia and for those of you who don't know about patreon this is a group that i started a couple of weeks ago where i share with you a deeper layer of my knowledge and i share with you all of the docs that i have here in every video in the channel and there is a chat function where you can ask me questions and we get together and share our knowledge so go ahead and check it out i'm going to leave a link in the description below all right so jumping in the first question the first question is how do you measure success of an accounts receivable function so this is more of a question for someone who's applying for a job as a staff accountant on the accounts receivable side and in this question of measuring success in accounts receivable the hiring manager is looking for you to tell them what the job is right so they want to understand if you know what the job is uh through understanding how success looks right right so uh basically the things that they want to hear are things like timely billing so basically accounts receivable is about billing right so you're creating invoices to customers so the important thing about them is timely of issuance of these invoices right so timely billing the customers are getting their invoices on time right so when the customers receive their invoices on time it means that the company also can close its books faster right so sending invoices timely means closing the books timely right so this shows you awareness between the connection the connection between accounts receivable and closing the books and records and the other thing is faster collection so when you send the invoices on a timely basis to the customer then you have a faster collection from the customer so this shows that you can close the loop from sending an invoice to closing the books and faster collection so that's for invoicing now the other measure of success for accounts receivable is collection and faster collection from the customer so for you to have a faster collection from the customer you need to be monitoring ar aging or accounts receivable aging and we've discussed ar aging in the past on this channel but basically what ar aging is is breaking down the accounts receivable by customer and by time period showing where a customer is 30 days due 60 days 90 days and then maybe 120 days past you obviously the longer it takes from a customer the higher the likelihood that you're not gonna collect they are right so monitoring ar aging is huge and then the other piece to this is following up with customers right so you follow up you send an email with an account statement uh so you look at they are aging and look at the customers who are late on paying and sending an email reminder uh with an account statement so to summarize it's um timely billing sending invoices on time which yields faster closing of the books and faster collection and the faster collection is achieved via monitoring accounts receivable aging and following up with the customer and a bonus tip here if you want to impress the hiring manager you speak to these sales outstanding so one of the kpis or the key performance indicators for accounts receivable is uh day sales outstanding i'm gonna leave a link up here today sales outstanding in one of the videos where i discussed it in detail so dso they sales outstanding is a kpi that measures the length of time it takes for a company to collect the cash from the sales right so from creating the invoices from the sale all the way to collection of cash so measuring dso is a good way for someone who works in accounts receivable to make sure that they are collecting their invoices timely all right the second question on my list is how do you measure success for an accounts payable function so accounts payable obviously is the other side of the coin to accounts receivable and accounts receivable you are sending out invoices to customers and collecting the cash with accounts payable you are receiving invoices from vendors and suppliers and paying them out right so how do you measure success for that well the first thing is going to be timely payments so you make sure that you're paying your vendors and suppliers on time right so this entails you receiving the invoices usually by email sometimes by a regular mail and having a way of keeping track of these invoices right so you save it to a folder for example in your computer and you make sure that you're keeping track of the payment terms right so the payment terms could be net 30 and at 15 or do upon receipt whatever the case is you keep track of that and make sure the payments are made on time usually the way this is done is by an accounting software or a billing software like bill.com or topalti or any of those systems and then you enter the vendor information with the payment terms and then you can keep track of it electronically and the system will alert you when you have to pay an invoice right so this is the first thing timely payment is hugely important for accounts payable right the other measure of success for accounts payable is going to be the monitoring of the aging of accounts payable so just like you monitor the aging of accounts receivable by customer and by time frame you also can download from whatever package you're using quickbooks or build.com whatever software you're using for accounts payable you can download an aging schedule that shows you by vendor and by time frame which vendor is due and which vendor is passed due right so when you monitor it monitor the aging schedule then you can make a decision on which vendors need to be paid right now or yesterday which uh which vendors will be paid next week and the week after that right so that's how you create a game plan of how to pay your vendors the other thing is uh the accurate collection and entry of vendor information right so when you get a new vendor or supplier to the company usually you have a process of getting the information from this vendor this process could be a paper process you send them a pdf form to fill out by email or could be a process via quickbooks or bell.com where they get an electronic email that shows them how to enter the information so you gotta be able to collect the information from your vendor and keep it keep an accurate vendor information and then responding to vendor inquiries this is a huge part of accounts payable right responding to vendor inquiries usually you'll get an email asking for the payment status you're going to be able to look in the accounting system and figure out the status of the payment and then respond to the vendor let them know when they expect to see when they can expect to see the payment also the other measure of success for accounts payable is no payments ever obviously this is huge right uh you're you're spending the company's money you got to make sure you're accurate that you're not making errors and making payments right so if for example a payment is a thousand dollars and you put an extra zero it turns into ten thousand dollars so you can see here where i'm going with this is accuracy is important so you gotta mention to the hiring manager uh the importance of no payment errors not making um payment errors right and a bonus tip here if you wanna impress the hiring manager you speak to identifying accruals right so identifying accruals means that you are someone who works in accounts payable uh you expect to get an invoice from a certain vendor let's say a vendor x was supposed to send an invoice for 10 000 for a certain expense and you didn't get that invoice you didn't receive it so you are the best person who can flag this accrual to the accounting team and say hey i didn't receive this invoice we are we're supposed to approve for this expense in our books of records in order to close the books right so identifying where an invoice has been received and flagging that as an accrual to the accounting team is a huge bonus tip in when the hiring manager personally when i hear that as a controller when i hear that from a candidate i am thoroughly impressed so you need to mention identifying accruals in accounts payable all right question number three in my list what is the difference between public and private accounting and this may seem as a basic question to you but in this question the hiring manager is trying to gauge your general knowledge of the difference between public and private accounting so let's break it down a little bit so for public accounting is obviously a service right and it could come in the form of audit or tax or advisory service and usually is uh provided by someone with a high level of certification it could be a certified public accountant or cpa if it's audit if it's tax it usually is either a cpa or an enrolled agent or sometimes attorney and then if it's advisory it could be cpa if it's an advisory related to accounting services or it could be a cfa or certified financial advisor if it's related more to the strategic finance of things right so public accounting is going to come in the form of audit tax or advisory service now on the private accounting side this is the actual process of creating the books or records for a private or a publicly traded entity right so this is when you work in the inside of the company as an accountant and keep track of the books and records compile the financial statements and create the footnote and the financial disclosures for the company right so public accounting is a service provided by a public accounting firm private accounting is the process of creating the books of records for the company that you work for and the inside of the company and the accounting department all right question number four and a very common question in accounting interviews is what is the difference between accounts payable and accounts receivable and at the beginning of this video we've covered the success in ar and the success in ap you might want to go back to that if you want to but let's recap here because the hiring manager are just looking for your um logical breakdown of the differences right so looking just to hear you out and see how you will present what the differences are between accounts receivable and accounts payable right so to summarize accounts receivable process it's the process of invoice creation communication of these invoices to clients right so you gotta send the invoices out to your clients and then the subsequent cash collection but it also involves the issuance of credit memos and credit memos to give you an idea is when you give a sort of refund to a client right so if you issue an invoice for a thousand dollars to a client for a service and you call you up and they're extremely unhappy with the service and you offer them a partial refund this is what we call a credit memo right so the service is a thousand dollars you might offer them two hundred dollars in a credit memo which will offset and reduce what they owe from a thousand to eight hundred dollars so this is the process of accounts receivable and for the accounts payable process to summarize this is the process of collecting and receiving invoices from vendors and suppliers and then recording and coding these invoices into the accounting package right so if you receive an invoice from a supplier you gotta enter it and let's say quickbooks and you have to select the gl account which which expense account is going to hit and also you gotta select a department for example so let's say it's an invoice related to human resources or the operation team you gotta select which department it pertains to this is what we're referring to when we say coding the invoice into the accounting package right and then creating the payments so creating the payments obviously is in the forum of check or ach or wire so this is part of the accounts receivable process and then managing the payment information so you're managing banking information from clients usually you keep this information secure in the accounting system or in the bank website so you're managing the payment information this is just to summarize the accounts payable process and a bonus tip here on the difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable if you really want to impress that hiring manager is that you can mention that the process of accounts receivable is referred to as order to cash right so why we call it order to cash is that because it refers to the process from receiving an order from customers all the way to sending an invoice and receiving cash so we call that order to cash right and the flip side on the accounts payable side we call that procure to pay right so procure refers to the process of engaging a vendor and getting the service from that vendor or the goods and then all the way to getting an invoice and then payment to that vendor so it's called procure to pay so the accounts receivable refers to the process of order to cash and the accounts payable process or elsewhere is referred to as the process of procure to pay all right question number five on my list is related to inventory accounting and this is more relevant to someone who's applying for an accounting role that's going to be handling inventory so the question goes what is perpetual inventory system and how is it different from a periodic inventory system so the keywords here is perpetual inventory versus periodic inventory right so let me break it down to you in plain language first and then i'll give you more of the polished answer you can give during the interview so basically in plain language when if you're selling tvs let's say you're best buy and you're selling tvs if you're running perpetual inventory it means that you're recording the reduction of inventory uh real time so if there is still the tv during the day you reduce the inventory and you record the cost of goods sold in the same day uh real time right if you are running periodic um inventory then you're only doing this at month end or a period end right so let's say you only take count of the inventory every month and that's when you're realizing that you sold one tv and at that point you reduce your inventory and you poke the cost of goods sold so again in plain language perpetual inventory means real time recording of the purchase or sale of inventory while periodic means at the end of each period right so it's very simple uh the way you give this as a polished answer in the interview could be something like this so perpetual inventory is a method of accounting for inventory that records the sale or purchase of inventory immediately or real time through the use of computerized point of sale systems and an enterprise asset management software on the other hand the periodic inventory system uses an occasional physical count to measure the level of inventory and the cost of goods sold all right question number six and the final question today what is your role within the month end close process so basically this is a month in close question and don't stress too much because you're not expected to know the entire month in closed process right this is a staff accountant position you're applying for this is not a controller position you're not supposed to answer everything related to monthly and close but just speak to your role uh in the month in close process right so uh just speak to what you did so if you worked in accounts receivable you can just speak to what you've done in terms of billing and sending invoices to customers collecting the cash applying that cash to the open invoices in the system just speak to that describe the process right that contributes to the monthly and close and if you work more on the expenses side speak to that as well so if you work on the ap side you'll receive invoices you call them in the system you you pay out the cash you apply these payments to the open vendor invoices speak to that and explain the process what the hiring manager is looking for here um is you know engaging your awareness of your role and how it contributes to month monthly close so try to tie what you do to the monthly influence so if it's accounts receivable you know billing obviously will will then book revenue on the books so booking revenue and accounts receivable on the balance sheet right if you work on the expensive side your roll will record the expenses we'll get all the expenses in the system and also record the accounts payable on the balance sheet and that's it these are my six questions for staff accountants interview if you like the video give it a big thumbs up and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: The Financial Controller

Views: 123,503

Keywords: Accountant interview questions, common accountant interview questions, Staff accountant interview, Accounting job interview

Id: 9V_OJlXY2-E

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021