Top 5 Skills of Accounting Professionals Today: #5

Here is number 5! It was tough to rank these because I would argue that all of these skills are probably a basic requirement to be a successful accounting professional in today’s day and age.

I picked this one as number 5 because it is a technical skill that can easily be learned. If you are interested in pursuing the knowledge and dedicate just a couple of hours a day to practice your skills, you can become an expert pretty quickly. There are limitless Google help articles, software help articles, blogs, or YouTube videos teaching you how to maximize your experience with any software. All you have to do is want to learn it.

Computer skills

• Comfort with Software Stack
• Comfort with Technology
• Computer skills

No matter what you want to call this one. Comfort with technology is an absolute must-have skill for anyone wanting to move forward in their accounting career. This is an unavoidable fact. We are all already living in a world where technology runs our lives. Your ability to learn this skill is going to determine how far you go in your journey.

The way you can quickly become skilled in this area with any new software will take a combination of curiosity and fearlessness. People who are generally bad or uncomfortable with software tend to 1. Lack Curiosity and 2. Fear the software due to lack of understanding.

If you are curious one of the first things you might do is go into your settings and see what type of customizations are available to you. Or you could go and click around on various buttons to see what they do. I like to look up tips and tricks from others on the internet showing me the most useful functions within a software when I first open them.

With AI chatbots like ChatGPT, you should assume the software can do something until proven otherwise. We can leverage tools like ChatGPT to help us arrive at answers that sometimes might have taken more of our research to find.

Secondly, don’t be afraid that you will break something. If you are afraid, you can combat this by reading some helpful articles or doing some tests that don’t involve outside people. This is usually the one that holds people back the most. People’s lack of understanding of a product causes them to be afraid, and rather than remaining curious and doing more research to learn, they instead stop using the software entirely or only do things that they are comfortable with.

Generally, you would think I spend a lot of my time teaching my team about accounting right? Wrong. I probably spend the least amount of time teaching them accounting because that’s a skill that they have a natural curiosity to learn more about.

Whenever I hire a new person on the team, the first thing I do is start evaluating their level of comfort with technology. I spend a lot of the first week of training showing them how to set up and navigate different types of software rather than doing formal accounting training. This is the definition of setting someone up for success! They need to be able to stay focused, manage their attention, and control the way that they interact with the software rather than letting the software demand precious attention from them.

Here are some examples of commonly used software. If you haven’t discovered these functions yet, why don’t you go and try some of these for yourself now! For all the examples below, I have not provided detailed instructions on purpose because I would like you to practice looking up how to do this on your own and customize it to your preferences. If you type in the name of the software + the function that I’ve listed, one of the first results should provide the detailed instructions that you need to get set up.

• Slack
  • Send later – This is a great tool for everyone because you can queue up messages to send at a later time. For individual contributors, we can use this to queue up reminders to send out at month-end close or to remind someone to follow up at a later time. For leaders who are working late or on weekends, you can queue up a message to be sent the following morning or Monday at 9 AM. People tend to tackle emails from the most recent emails received to older emails. I like to queue up my slacks/emails for the next business day at 6 AM PST because most of my colleagues are in the US, so by setting the email to send at 6 AM, my email should show up first thing for any East Coasters or pretty high up in the email list for my West Coast friends. This way I ensure that my email gets the best chance of getting a response.
  • Remind Me / Save for Later – These two are actually very similar. Remind Me allows you to save messages to revisit at a later time. All the messages that are tagged here can be easily accessed in your left-hand panel. Save for later is an even better version of remind you, you can tag a message as save for later and set a reminder time, and the message will pop up at the time that you ask similar to a new message. It comes in handy when you need to follow up with someone later regarding something, and you can ask Slack to remind you later at a time of your choosing.
  • Create sections / Custom notification settings for each section – Anyone using Slack knows that very quickly the channels and notifications can become overwhelming. You need to be very intentional about what gets your attention. I first like to create sections for my DMs and channels separating them either into groups of importance or maybe similar types. You can set notification preferences for each DM or channel and you can also choose to show and sort each section. The combination of these two settings should allow you to control who gets your attention and how, allowing you to focus on the things you want and need to focus on. Here’s an example list of the sections I have along with the notification preferences that I’ve set up.
    • Accounting team and direct report DMs (direct messages) – Notify me every message
    • Larger finance team including my FPA DMs – Notify me every message
    • HR / Payroll team – Notify me every message
    • Channels regarding customers – Show mentions only (these channels get a lot of action, so I only want to be notified when someone specifically mentions me or @here or @channel)
    • General company notifications such as #office or #company-updates -Show mentions only
• Email client (Gmail, Outlook, etc) – Regardless of what your personal email strategy is, Inbox Zero, Inbox 30,000 Unread emails 😂, Here are some helpful tools to help you focus your attention. Same as above for Slack: Send Later
  • Snooze / Remind Me (same as Remind Me/Save for later under the slack section)
  • Learn your keyboard shortcuts! Or set up your own. (I’ve listed some Gmail shortcuts that I use every day) The list is long and you can go to this link to look up ones that might be helpful for you!
    • C – Compose new mail
    • Cmd / Ctrl + Enter – Send
    • Cmd / Ctrl + C – Add cc recipients
    • Cmd / Ctrl + K – Insert Link
    • E – Archive
    • M – Mute Conversation
    • R – Reply
  • Filter your emails – quickly filter out things that do not require your time or unsubscribe from these emails. I tend to filter out any emails that are alerts that I want a record of but do not need to hit my inbox. You can use filters to identify certain emails by entering specific characteristics, then you have the option of determining what Gmail does with them. Some of my favorites are
    • Mark as read
    • Archive it
    • Skip the inbox
    • Label
• Google Sheets / Excel – You would think that this would be a basic tool that all accountants would be very comfortable with. Unfortunately, it can take years of practice to hone your skills and develop the type of muscle memory that will make you Excel champ. At my company, we have almost done away completely with Excel, and 95% of our work is done in Google Sheets. I believe that Google Sheets should eventually replace Excel in the next 5-10 years. KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS – I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve had to watch my teammates struggle to find a command in the ribbon bar or struggle to move their highlighted cell around. LEARN YOUR KEYBOARD shortcuts. This will automatically make you LOOK like an Excel whiz 😉 It will also quickly improve your ability to move quickly in Excel and churn out work products. Nothing shows your inability to use Excel effectively than someone who only navigates with a mouse.
  • Pivot tables – I recently discovered that one of my team members did not understand how pivot tables worked. They’ve always relied on someone else to set up their pivot tables, and all they had to do was refresh the data and the pivot table to update their results. An accountant who cannot comfortably use pivot tables will be unable to do analysis. It is one of the most useful tools to summarize data and help with your analysis.
  • Most commonly used formula list! Know each one of these intimately! I’ve only included the ones that I use most frequently. As you become more comfortable with Excel, there are more advanced formulas that I recommend. Let me know if you’re interested in learning about these. But for now, I don’t want to overwhelm you.
    • VLookUp – designed to search for a specific value in the first column of a table or range and retrieve corresponding data from a different column in the same row
    • SumIf, SumIfs – SumIf is used to sum values in a specified range based on a given criterion, and SumIfs is used to sum values in a specified range based on multiple sets of given criteria.
    • Concatenate – Used to join different pieces of text together or combine values from several cells into one cell
    • EOMonth – returns the last day of a month which is a specified number of months before or after a start date. Useful for building tables where you need to calculate the last day of a month in a nearby cell.

I know this is probably a lot of information, but if you can learn/utilize and make the most of this list in your first few months in your accounting role, you will already be more successful than most. Most accounting leaders do not spend the time to train their teams these days in software or otherwise, they give them very specific instructions or SOPs and then expect the accountants to follow these instructions blindly without using their brains. But we’re not COGs in a machine and if you hope to not be replaced by the AI in a few years (I’m joking of course, maybe😉), then you will want to be a contributing member of the team that can bring new skills and solutions.

I’m constantly looking to increase my skills even after 15 years in the industry. The latest one that I learned how to use was the formula SumProduct in Excel. Once you’ve mastered the ones listed above, maybe you will give this one a try. I’ll be setting up some example workbooks where we can utilize this formula in the near future.

Are there any other tools that I’ve missed that you use frequently? Are there helpful functions, formulas, or shortcuts that I’ve missed? Let me know!