Accounting Assistant Resume

GAAP tells you the rules of accounting, but before you start applying them, you need to learn the generally accepted resume principles for writing a resume that lands jobs.

With the principles for writing a great resume in mind, read our three tips for making an accounting assistant resume that impresses employers and gets you more interviews.

1. Highlight your accounting assistant skills

As an accounting assistant, you support finance and accounting teams on various day-to-day tasks. As a result, hiring managers want to know how well you work with others, juggle multiple responsibilities, and handle financial records. So they’ll look for relevant hard and soft skills on your accounting assistant resume.

Hard skills are the accounting-specific skills you learned in school or on the job that show employers you can do all that’s required of an assistant accountant.

So highlight your relevant skills throughout your resume by listing them directly in your resume skills section and including examples of how you’ve used them in your resume’s work experience section.

Here are some valuable hard skills you can add to your accounting assistant resume:

• Processing invoices
• Recording financial transactions
• Preparing financial reports
• Auditing
• Updating ledgers
• Accounts receivable
• Accounts payable
• Bookkeeping software: Quickbooks, Quickbooks Online, ADP, and Paychex
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

But, only knowing the technical side of a job isn’t enough to get a great accounting assistant job. Employers also need you to have relevant soft skills (or personality traits), such as taking instructions well and being a team player.

For instance, you might need to use your communication skills to settle a disputed account with an external client or to follow up on a request from an internal partner. And during the month-end close, you’ll need to keep your cool when handling any last-minute tasks that arise.

Below are some of the best soft skills for account assistants:

• Work well under pressure
• Analytical thinking
• Multitasking
• Organization
• Adaptability
• Teamwork 
• Collaborating with internal and external clients

2. Begin with an eye-catching accounting assistant resume summary

Hiring managers have a limited amount of time to look over resumes, so draw them in with an impressive accounting assistant resume summary.

A resume summary is an introduction at the top of your resume that highlights your most impressive accounting skills and achievements in only 1-5 sentences. Short and to the point is key here — you just want to interest employers enough that they’ll look closely at the rest of your resume.

Include your current job title and a brief outline of your accounting experience and past responsibilities. Then add any eye-catching skills, qualifications, or accounting education you have.

Here’s an example of a well-written resume summary for an assistant accountant:

If you’ve just graduated from college or are breaking into the accounting field for the first time, use a resume objective instead of a resume summary. An accounting assistant resume objective focuses on your transferable skills and reasons for wanting to work in the field rather than your past accounting experience.

3. Use hard numbers to highlight your accounting assistant experience

Quantifying your resume with hard numbers gives hiring managers concrete examples of what kinds of tasks you’ve been responsible for and what results you’ve produced as an accounting assistant.

Hiring managers are more likely to interview you when they see proof that you’ve been successful in your current accounting role.

Note how our accounting assistant applicant uses numbers to illustrate their work history:

• Handle customer disputes by communicating with customers and investigating non-payment issues, clearing $1.2m+ in accounts receivable
• Processed and verified 80+ check payments for 15+ vendors per month
• Created VBA program in Excel to automate complex filing procedures, cutting billing entry time by 40%

You may not have performed these exact tasks, but you can use them to get ideas for quantifying your experience. Here are more examples of hard numbers you can emphasize on your accounting assistant resume:

• the size of accounts or databases you managed
• how much money or time you saved
• the number of clients you worked with