senior accountant Sample

Over the last several years, you’ve been working on your skills and achievements with things like budgets, payroll, audits, and financial planning for your organization. You’ve become so good that your employers always come to you to get finance things done. You’re starting to feel like it’s time to move up in the world to be a Senior Accountant. A vertical move in your career should always be your goal. 

How do you move from Accountant to Senior Accountant? The first step is to gather some information about your career history – a list of the jobs you’ve held and the achievements you’ve had at each one. Then, you write a stand-out resume to impress hiring managers so they’ll call you for an interview. 

Writing your resume isn’t the easiest thing in the world though. There are rules and best practices you have to follow. Most people have no clue about these or get mixed information from searching online. To help you out, we’ve built a senior account resume example for you to use. Also, in this article, you’ll find some resume-writing tips and tricks that you can use to win those coveted interview calls. 

Let's get started.

How to write a resume

The basics of resume writing are to choose the right Senior Accountant resume format – chronological, hybrid, functional – and add your contact information, a profile summary, your work history, and your education. There is a template later in this article that you can use to see how to layout your resume.

Beyond the basics, there are some things you need to do to stand out as a Senior Accountant. One of the most important things is to quantify your experiences. 

Quantify!

Many resumes end up on the hiring manager’s desk with a list of jobs that the job seeker has been in with a bulleted list of responsibilities. Most of the time, that bulleted list of responsibilities is copied and pasted from the job description for the role the job seeker held. 

For the love of all things that are good on planet Earth, do not do this with your resume. All that accomplishes is to tell future employers what you were supposed to do in your past roles. Let’s face it, there are a lot of things people are responsible for that never get done. Take the time to write achievement bullets for your accomplishments at your previous positions. 

When you talk about things you actually did, you show how you can bring value to future employers. They assume that if you can do those things for past employers, then you can probably do it for them, too. 

What does all of this mean? Let’s look at an example. Most Senior Accountant resumes will have verbiage that looks like this:

• “Prepared financial statements and reports for a Fortune 500 organization.”

Congratulations, you prepared financial reports. So has every other Senior Accountant job seeker. So, to stand out from the crowd and impress the hiring manager, write this instead”

• “Implemented streamlined financial statement creation processes each month that reduced closing cycle by 20%.”

All of a sudden you’re wowing the hiring manager and showing something that you can do that will benefit their company and team. 

Use action words

On top of quantifying your achievements to show value,  you should remove the phrases “responsible for,” “accountable for,” and “charged with” from your resume-writing vocabulary. Those phrases do not add value to your resume. Instead, you should begin each sentence and bullet point on your resume with a verb. For example:

• Led

• Managed

• Achieve

• Improved

• Directed

Using action can also reduce any ambiguity in your resume. If you write something like, “Worked on financial reports,” the question could then be posed, “What work did you do?” It would be better to write, “Authored financial reports” or “Analyzed financial reports.” These phrases are more specific and let future hiring managers know exactly what you did. 

Senior Accountant resume example 

Because the need for a compelling resume is so important for a Senior Accountant, it’s critical to gain a full understanding of what your final result should look like. To that end, we’d like to provide you with a Senior Accountant resume example that you can use for inspiration and as a template. Using it as a template is a good idea because structure and format are just as important as the content. 

Hiring managers are used to seeing the reverse-chronological resume format. It has information laid out in a logical way that allows them to quickly skim through the document to find what they want. The reverse format is also great for getting past the applicant tracking systems (ATS) companies use to weed out candidates. 

To keep you at the top of your game, the end result of your resume should look something like this:

Key hard & soft skills for Senior Accountant

One last major point that needs to be made about writing your resume is that you should have a balanced mix of hard and soft skills. 

Hard skills

Hard skills, sometimes called technical skills, are things you’ve learned from school, on-the-job training, or hands-on experience. It’s the things you know how to do that allow you to perform the tasks of your job. 

Examples of hard skills for your Senior Accountant resume:

• Financial analysis

• Accounting software programs – QuickBooks, SAP

• Budgeting and forecasting

• Taxation

• Auditing

• Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

• Internal controls

• Financial modeling

• Variance analysis

• General ledger maintenance

Soft skills

On the other hand, soft skills are talents you have that make you good at collaborating with others, solving problems, and leading others. These natural abilities can be improved, but they are usually something you already have – or are born with. 

Examples of soft skills for your Senior Accountant resume:

• Attention to detail

• Adaptability

• Decision-making

• Stakeholder relations

• Multitasking

• Stress management

• Organization skills

• Teamwork

• Professionalism

• Presentation skills

Hiring managers sometimes place more value on soft skills than hard skills because they figure that hard skills can be taught. Additionally, soft skills help reveal your overall fit within the culture of the company. So, don’t forget to highlight those all-important interpersonal abilities on your Senior Accountant resume.

Summary & Last Words

They say that first impressions are the most important ones you’ll ever make and you don’t get a chance to redo them. Well, your resume is probably the first impression you’re going to make on a prospective employer. This is true even if you’re applying for a vertical role within the same company – the manager of the new role may not be the same as the manager of your current position. 

When you take the time to emphasize your career achievements using action words, you’ll be able to show future employers what you bring to the table. But remember, they want to know that you can do more than crunch numbers. You have to also highlight your skills in teamwork and communication. 

Introduction to ZipJob: Professional Resume Writers

Since there is a lot that goes into a Senior Accountant resume, you may feel it’s too tall an order to fill yourself. That’s okay. ZipJob has a team of professional resume writers who excel at writing resumes for Senior Accountants. Not only can they wordsmith your experiences to highlight your achievements, but they’ll work with you one-on-one to bring to light the most important things to include on your resume. This is crucial since your resume isn’t meant to be a dumping ground for everything you’ve ever done during your career. 

Why You Should Make Use of Our Resume Writing Services to Land Your Next Job as Senior Accountant

When you let ZipJob write your Senior Accountant resume, you end up with a document that concisely represents your career in a way that gets past the ATS and impresses hiring managers. The information on your resume will be written in a way that piques future employer’s interest and makes them want to ask you questions. Of course, that’s how you get the call for an interview. 

Resume Writing Service for Senior Accountant: Let us write your resume

In the spirit of getting that phone call or email inviting you for an interview, it would be worth the investment. When you think about it, your resume is arguably one of the most important financial documents you own because, without it, you can’t pay bills, go on vacation, or save for retirement. As a Senior Accountant, this concept should hit home. Considering the importance of your resume, it only makes sense to have a professional take care of writing it for you.