All business expenses must be paid promptly to ensure operations run smoothly. Your skills in expense verification, record keeping, and managing tax implications help manage regular payments effectively.
Does your resume template allow you to present an accurate record of your skills?
Applying to a financial position has unique challenges since companies want to ensure you have an intricate skill set. Allow us to help with our accounts payable specialist resume examples designed to successfully portray your skills in today’s job market.
What Matters Most: Your Accounts Payable Specialist Skills & Work Experience
When expenses need to be paid on time using appropriate protocols, businesses will want to ensure you have the right skills for the job.
It’s best practice for accounts payable specialists to include a mix of top industry skills and what the company is looking for in the job description. That way, you portray what you’re best at, like Quickbooks and purchase orders, while making it relevant to each company.
Here are some of the leading industry accounts payable specialist skills in 2024.
9 top accounts payable specialist skills
- Reconciliation
- Petty Cash Funds
- Sales Tax Requirements
- General Ledgers
- Invoice Management
- Microsoft Office
- Quickbooks
- Payroll Processing
- ACH
Sample accounts payable specialist work experience bullet points
Top skills like invoice management and reconciliation will have a hiring manager’s attention. However, they’ll still want to see your performance in past positions.
You’re an expert at managing and making sense of data, so this section should be a breeze. Think of numerical examples you can include that illustrate your performance, such as accuracy, efficiency, or cost reductions.
Remember that your work experience bullet points don’t need to be super lengthy to impress hiring personnel. Keeping everything concise makes your information easily understandable, such as a simple sentence about how you use Quickbooks to manage payroll and get all payments out on time.
Here are a few samples:
- Prepared 37 monthly vendor checks and recorded payment details in Excel with zero missed payments for 3 years.
- Set up a new invoice management system in Quickbooks to increase purchase processing efficiency by 55%.
- Used ACH systems to automate payroll processing, leading to a 70% reduction in administrative workload.
- Assigned proper sales taxes to purchases and managed payment verification, reducing chances of compliance issues by 98%.
Top 5 Tips for Your Accounts Payable Specialist Resume
- Keep it organized
- Apply the same steps you would take to organize spreadsheets while putting information on your resume. Clear headers, bullet points, and easy-to-read 12-14 point font help financial hiring managers identify your top skills like payment processing and invoice management.
- Short descriptions work best
- Hiring managers don’t need to know every detail about aspects like managing petty cash funds to know you’re skilled at it. Instead, a short description of how you managed petty cash records with no shortages over three years helps make that skill easily identifiable and provides relevant metrics to back it up.
- Focus on technical skills
- Accounts payable specialists need several technical skills, like federal tax compliance, that should be emphasized on your resume. Include any critical requirements in your top skills and use quantifiable examples from work experience to back them up.
- Reverse chronological formatting is best
- Accounts payable needs and regulations are always evolving. That means your most recent experiences in software like Quickbooks and complying with tax regulations should be listed first.
- One-page resumes are optimal
- Your resume should be a concise and well-rounded overview of your skills. If you’re struggling to fit everything, consider narrowing in on the exact needs of the position. Does the company need help with compliance? Then focusing on your knowledge of sales tax and reconciliations could be a good fit.
Accounts payable professionals with ten or more years of experience would benefit from a resume summary. You could write a couple of sentences about how you’ve managed $540,000 of payables in your ten-year career while complying with all federal regulations.
Your resume covers many technical aspects, so consider getting more personal in your cover letter. Writing things like why you’re passionate about finance or how you connect with the mission statement of the company you’re applying to can help your cover letter and application stand out.
Tailoring your listed skills to the needs of each job makes them stand out. For instance, if the company mentions using ACH and managing payroll, including as much information as possible about related skills and experiences could help you rise to the top over other candidates.
