5 Key Personality Traits of a Great Accountant
Those who want to be great at accounting need to have a wide variety of personality traits. While this is not an all-inclusive list, it’s important that anyone looking to become an accountant have the following personality traits.
Solid Organizational Skills
Accountants need to manage a large amount of paperwork—or, in the cloud, applications—in their daily operations. They need to be able to create a way to manage the information that they process on a daily basis. This requires quite a bit of organization. While some of these professionals have their own assistants, many have to keep their information organized on their own. Either way, good organizational skills will be necessary to either provide an assistant with clear instructions or to complete a variety of tasks in an effective manner.
Excellent Attention to Detail
Every day, accountants need to make sure that the numbers that they are using add up correctly and that their figures are correct. This means that the work they do should always be accurate and that they should be able to accomplish this task on their own. Attention to detail is a vitally important skill for this reason, as it allows the accountant to go over their own work and find any mistakes that they’ve made without additional help.
Customer Service Oriented
Accounting isn’t just about focusing on numbers, it’s also about paying careful attention to the needs of one’s clients. This means that accountants need to be extremely client-focused and understand each industry as completely as possible. Thorough research allows you to be focused on your clients, so you can provide them with information that is tailored to their industry. Learn about the industry, their specific needs for an accountant, and how your skills can help to make their ongoing tasks easier. This will help you through the onboarding process and into the future as you maintain them as a client.
Ability to be Trusted
Accountants regularly deal with highly confidential information. This means that it’s extremely important that a skilled accountant be extremely honest and trustworthy so that their clients know that they can send repeat business their way and also refer their friends and family to them. References can help you to represent your trustworthiness to potential clients so that they can see you for who you are.
Good Time Management Skills
Accountants need to have excellent time management skills as well so that they can carefully organize all of their appointments, client meetings, phone calls, and tasks. Completing all of these items on time is essential to build a client base and keep them happy, so it’s crucial that an accountant have great time management skills. It only takes a few missed appointments or phone calls that go unanswered before clients start to get annoyed.
Accountants must have specific personality skills in order to be good at the job. Otherwise, they can work in the field but may find that they struggle with the daily tasks that are required.
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