Senior Accountant

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“Senior Accountant Frequently Asked Questions in various Senior Accountant job interviews by interviewer. The set of questions are here to ensures that you offer a perfect answer posed to you. So get preparation for your new job interview”



77 Senior Accountant Questions And Answers

41⟩ Tell us have you ever been involved in an invoice dispute? How did you manage the problem?

Accounting job interview questions like this explore your conflict management skills. Emphasize your interpersonal skills, your maturity and your ability to stay calm in the face of difficulty. Describe the techniques you use to diffuse disputes such as asking questions to determine the reason for the dispute, not conveying blame and not becoming too emotional. Demonstrate your ability to work together with others to reach an acceptable resolution.

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42⟩ Explain what have you read in the newspapers in the last few days that particularly interested you?

Questions like this are testing your general interest in business and finance and your commercial awareness. You will be expected to come up with stories from the political, finance or other specialist sections of the papers that may be relevant to the firm or its clients.

Make sure that you read a quality newspaper regularly so that you are up to date with current business and financial affairs (One of the Big Four firms asks interviewees if they read the Financial Times). Try not to side with a particular opinion. Do not be party political! You should aim to provide a balanced assessment of a topic of interest to you. Explain why it interests you. Be prepared for follow-up questions.

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43⟩ Explain have you ever been involved in an invoice dispute? How did you manage the problem?

Accounting job interview questions like this explore your conflict management skills. Emphasize your interpersonal skills, your maturity and your ability to stay calm in the face of difficulty. Describe the techniques you use to diffuse disputes such as asking questions to determine the reason for the dispute, not conveying blame and not becoming too emotional. Demonstrate your ability to work together with others to reach an acceptable resolution.

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44⟩ Tell me does the accounting system appear to facilitate one specialty from financial, auditing, or cost managerial or tax accounting over the others?

The elegance of Accounting is that it is a purveyor of information, organized into systems, and exploited for a particular purpose. That is because Accounting is vague. Interestingly, information from accounting can be split into to methods:

☛ 1. Valuation

☛ 2. Evaluation

1. Valuation – This is the type of information that financial/Tax/Cost accounting attempts to tackle. What is that worth? How much of it came from this source of value? What will be the asset be worth in ten years? All of these questions are valuation methods and accounting provides an informational standpoint from which to analyze these questions and ascertain an answer to them.

2. Evaluation – This would be your classical managerial accounting. Did employee A provide hire effort? What should compensation look like? How are we performing? All are evaluation questions. Evaluation is especially important to Internal Audit and the control environment. You can easily image a professor conducting evaluation accounting to assign proper reward to students who exhibit learning through testing.

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46⟩ Tell me what are the items that are to be debited in accounting and what are the items that are to be credited in accounting?

This depends on the nature of the account and the thing you wish to achieve. For example, to increase cash you would debit the cash account, but if you wanted to decrease it, you would credit it. There are all sorts of accounts and they have different normal balances.

The thing to remember is that every journal entry must have equal debits and credits. So for example to increase a contra asset account like Allowance for Doubtful debts you would credit Bad Debt Expense to increase it and credit Allowance to increase that!

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49⟩ Tell me what is the relationship between cost accounting financial accounting and managerial accounting?

Financial accounting relates to the information presented based on past events and records.

Cost and managerial accounting is the presentation of financial information to the management to be used in decision making while in managerial accounting projections are made based on past trends.

Financial accounting relates to the information presented based on past events and records.

Cost and managerial accounting is the presentation of financial information to the management to be used in decision making while in managerial accounting projections are made based on past trends.

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52⟩ Tell me why are Accounting Standards necessary?

Accounting standards are necessary to promote high quality financial reporting. The fundamental role of accounting is to communicate economic information about businesses and other organization to various stakeholders including government, investors, shareholders, suppliers, lenders, customers, and the public. These stakeholders use such information to take decisions and to assess the stewardship of people appointed to manage such organizations. If this information were not of a high quality standard, then the stakeholders would be unable to take effective decisions that will benefit them. For example, if a financial report were manipulated to show higher profits, investors would hold on to their shares with the belief that the company is doing well.

Accounting standards came to be developed from the mid sixties onwards to promote the integrity of the accounting profession by way of ensuring uniformity in the way accountants report transactions in their books and in their preparation of the final accounts of businesses. This is largely aimed at boosting the confidence of stakeholders, particularly shareholders and potential investors in the accounting profession.

Good and useful information should have the essential characteristics of understandability, comparability, relevance, and reliability in order to play its role effectively.

Accounting standards serve to promote the understandability, comparability, relevance, and reliability of financial reports.

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54⟩ Tell me what are the effects of international accounting standards on accounting practices of developing nations?

Adoption of international accounting standards is extremely costly. Developing counties usually use accounting standards that are most beneficial to them (based on who they trade with to ease accounting for transactions) or just another country’s GAAP that works for the developing country. Ex. Mexico very closely resembles U.S. GAAP because of NAFTA and the quality of U.S. GAAP.

Should IFRS be implemented in developed counties, developing counties might be forced to adopt them as well in order to maintain trade relations. This could be extremely costly for smaller developing counties.

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55⟩ Explain me what qualities have you got that would make you a good accountant?

Aside from the obvious ones such as numeracy and interpersonal skills, key skills will include determination and self discipline (to get through the difficult professional examinations) and an interest in the business world generally. An ability to work in (and ultimately lead) teams, strong analytical skills, good verbal and written communication skills and curiosity (particularly on the audit side) are some of the others you could mention – if you aren’t strong in some of these areas then you may have problems making a persuasive case for yourself.

You are likely to be asked many questions seeking evidence of these particular competencies and will be expected to give examples which are backed up with evidence: for example, if asked about your leadership qualities, you should give an example of where you led a group successfully rather than just stating ‘people always look to me to take the lead’.

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56⟩ Please explain what is fair value accounting?

Fair Value accounting is an accounting term that requires a company to place a value on all of the assets on its balance sheet that, it is the price at which the assets could be sold. This is easy to do when the asset has a quoted market price. However, it is often the case that there is no liquid market for an asset, and thus the company has to make an estimate of fair value. When the marketplace is in turmoil and illiquid, as it has been for much of 2008, companies are sometimes forced to place a very low value on an asset, resulting in a substantial markdown from the prior value. See related links for complete explanations.

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58⟩ Tell me how did you chose your university?

Be honest, but try to show evidence for careful consideration and logic in your choice. The interviewer may follow up this question by asking if, with hindsight, you felt you made the right choice, or how you feel the course you have followed could be improved. Constructive and thoughtful criticism is appreciated, but try to balance any criticisms with positive points too.

You could include in your answer any of the following:

☛ Advice & guidance from teaching/careers staff at school or college

☛ Geographical preferences

☛ Availability of a particular course

☛ The research and/or teaching quality of institutions

☛ Cost factors

☛ The reputation of the institution, or individual members of staff

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59⟩ Explain me what is the difference between financial accounting and management accounting?

Very briefly, the difference has to do with the needs of the user.

Management accounting for is the internal users of an entity and Financial Accounting is for the external users.

Internal users (management) may be interested in the cost of making an item using process A versus process B.

Whereas External users are mostly interested in the overall results of those management decisions.

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60⟩ Tell me what are the different fields of accounting?

There is one field of accounting, but there are many different jobs within the field such as auditor, bookkeeper, payroll accountant, cost accountant, tax accountants, etc. Accountants wear many hats and often do different tasks for different clients.

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