Sample Interview Questions for Accountants

Q. - What is the biggest mistake that candidates make when they attend an interview?
A. - They don’t prepare properly

Many individuals go to an interview and think that they will be able to just answer any questions that are thrown they way. Our biggest piece of advice to you is to prepare yourself for each and every interview. The following are sample questions to help you prepare for your interviews based on the role that you hold.

General Questions – prepare answers to these questions going back about 5 years
1. What was the size of the company you were working for?
2. How large was the accounting group? Where did your position fall in comparison to others (i.e. outline for me an organizational pyramid)
3. What services or products did the company provide or produce?
4. What was your title?
5. What were your functions/ duties?
6. What would you say you spent the most time doing?
7. What else took up significant amounts of your time?
8. What functions did you perform outside of your normal duties?
9. What computer systems were you utilizing?
10. Have you ever gone through a systems conversion?
11. Tell me about a time when you have made an error in the work that you performed.
12. What type of environment suits you best and why?
13. How much overtime will you work, if necessary?
14. Tell me about your educational background.
15. How long have you been conducting your search for a new role?
16. How many second or follow up interviews have you been receiving?
17. How soon can you start?
18. Why is it that you left or are looking to leave the company?
19. What else would you like to add?

Specific Questions by Job Classification
Accounts Payable
1. How many cheques did you process each AP Cycle? (weekly or biweekly)
2. Did you have “full-cycle” AP responsibilities (i.e. coding of cheques, inputting, printing the cheques) or did you only perform part of the process
3. How many invoices do you match, batch and/or code per week/ month?
4. What is the total dollar volume of these invoices?
5. How is the posting done; manually or computerized? If computerized, what system?
6. How much data entry is involved?
7. Do you prepare journal entries?
8. What is your responsibility with the expense account?
9. How do you handle discrepancies?

Payroll
1. How is payroll produced (in house or outside service)?
2. If outside – who did you utilize?
3. How many people are in the payroll department and where does your position fall in terms of hierarchy?
4. How many employees did you produce payroll for?
5. Do you deal with union or non-union payroll?
6. Are the employees paid on salary or hourly?
7. What experience do you have with multi-provincial payroll?
8. When have you done vacation/ sick/ termination/ garnishment cheques?
9. What exposure do you have to payroll taxes?
10. How does the payroll information get to the financial statements?

Accounts Receivable/ Billing
1. How complex was the billing process (i.e. based on contracts, simple hourly or flat rate charges, etc…)?
2. How many accounts do you work on per week/ month and what is the cash volume?
3. How frequently did you bill your clients?
4. How were collections handled at the company?
5. What is your experience with cash applications, how frequently do you take care of them and are there bank deposits?
6. What about your experience with working with a lock box?
7. Do you review aging reports?

Bank Account Reconciliation
1. How many accounts did you have to reconcile monthly?
2. Were they single or multi currency?
3. How many cheques per average reconciliation?
4. What types of accounts were they?

Staff Accountants
1. What is a typical day for you? Where do you spend the bulk of your time?
2. Are you responsible for the general ledger account reconciliation work? How much G/L analysis do you do? Are there multiple ledgers?
3. Do you do the bank reconciliation work?
4. How much review of journal entries do you perform? What is the most effective way of identifying errors?
5. What was the timing of the month end close? What is your role in the month end close?
6. How much involvement did you have in the preparation of monthly financial statements?
7. Do you supervise or train any employees?
8. Tell me about your budgeting experience – what is the total amount of the budget for which you have responsibility?
9. What is your role with the outside auditors?
10. Tell me about your tax experience.
11. Tell me about some of the special projects to which you have been assigned.
12. What computerized accounting systems have you utilized?

Audit
1. How long have you been involved in auditing?
2. Which type: internal/ external/ EDP/ government/ public/ private/ financial/ operational SOX?
3. Have you led a team?
4. Explain to me a typical audit you would perform.
5. What type of training did you receive?
6. How long was the average audit that you performed?
7. How much money have you saved a company with your findings?
8. What types of operational improvements were implemented as a result of the audit recommendations?

Cost
1. What is your cost background? Do you handle standard, job or labour costing or all three?
2. Which specific cost systems can you work with?
3. What type of variance analysis do you perform?
4. What inventory analysis do you perform?
5. What is your responsibility as it relates to the financial statements?
6. How does your department work with activity based costing?
7. What percentage of the budget are you responsible for and what is the volume?

Financial Analysis
1. Please explain the type of analysis you perform
2. What is your role with the corporate budget? What is the total volume on that budget?
3. What type of work do you do with the profit and loss and/or balance sheet?
4. How much short or long term planning have you done?
5. What supervisory role do you play, if any?
6. How do you assist the auditors when they come to your office?
7. Have you developed any type of financial modeling? Explain.
8. In what way did you utilize the accounting package and what type of ad hoc reporting did you perform?
9. What types of special projects did you handle?
10. What is your role/ interaction with executive management?

Tax
1. Explain the specialty: corporate, partnership, personal, expatriate, property, sales, payroll, estate, trust, etc… - what specifically have you done with each?
2. How many provinces have you filed for?
3. What tax software do you know?
4. How much research have you done vs. planning?
5. Have you any exposure to bankruptcy filings?
6. What certifications do you have to practice in the tax field?
7. Have you been involved in any type of management or tax training?

Accounting Manager/ Controller
1. How large was the department that you were responsible for?
2. What was the timing of your monthly close?
3. How consistent and up to date were the monthly account reconciliations and back reconciliations
4. What accounting system did you utilize? What did you like about it? What did you not like about it? Have you ever been involved in a computer conversion?
5. Are you one who “rolls up your sleeves” or one who supervises from a short distance?
6. Explain the duties that you handle on a day to day basis
7. What is your interface with the budget?
8. What is your responsibility with risk management?
9. How much money have you saved your company and how did you do this?
10. What special projects do you work on?
11. How much overtime is expected of you?

VP Finance/ CFO – you need to be able to answer many of the above questions as well as others such as…
1. What could your organization have done to improve operationally?
2. How was the cash flow? Line of Credit? Factoring?

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