Hiring a Good Accountant: Twelve Interview Questions That Matter

A bad hire in finance shows up late — usually a year later, in the form of rejected books, penalties and a file that has to be rebuilt from scratch. This is written for owners who want to know what to define before advertising, what to ask in the interview, and which controls to put in place once someone starts.

Define the role before you write the advert

Most failed hires I have seen did not fail in the interview; they failed because nobody defined the job. Put four things on paper first: workload (vouchers per month, sales invoices, headcount, bank accounts, warehouses), scope (posting only, or payroll, inventory, treasury and tax filings too), tools (current software, the level of Excel required, which government portals), and monthly outputs (which report, by what date, to whom).

If you cannot write those four, you do not yet know who you are hiring, and the interview becomes a general conversation. Writing them sometimes changes the answer entirely — an owner convinced he needed a full-time accountant counts his monthly vouchers and realises he needs a part-timer plus an external adviser.

Match the seniority to the need

The common error is expecting finance-manager output on an assistant's salary. On a tight budget, an in-house accountant paired with an external adviser for tax and year-end usually beats one "does everything" hire — the trade-offs are set out in outsourcing your accounting.

The twelve questions

1. Walk me through the last year-end close you ran, start to finish. A good answer has sequence: reconciliations, stock count, provisions, depreciation, adjustments, tax reconciliation.
2. What tax and social security filings did you make last month, and what were the deadlines?
3. Explain the difference between accounting profit and taxable income. Fluency here usually means real file experience.
4. Describe an expense that was disallowed on assessment, and what you changed afterwards.
5. How do you run a bank reconciliation, and what items usually stay open? Expect cheques in transit, unrecorded charges, unidentified deposits.
6. Who designed the chart of accounts where you last worked, and what would you change? This separates a software user from an accountant.
7. How do you cost a product or a project? Materials, labour, overhead and the allocation basis should all appear.
8. What would you do if I asked you to invoice goods that have not been delivered? The right answer is a polite refusal with a lawful alternative.
9. What is the last thing you built in Excel? Lookups and pivot tables are the floor.
10. What did the monthly report you gave management contain?
11. How do you keep track of changes in tax circulars? Good answers name specific sources.
12. What would you do in your first thirty days here? Good answers start by learning the current state, not by promising a new system.

The one-hour practical test

Give a small, anonymised sample of your own work: five vouchers with incomplete attachments to post and query; a month of bank statements containing three deliberate discrepancies; a raw sales export to summarise by customer and month. Then one analytical question — "profit is up on last year but cash is down; give me three likely reasons."

That last one separates candidates fastest. Anyone who immediately reaches for rising inventory, growing receivables and loan principal repayments understands cash flow and working capital.

References and controls

Two short calls to previous employers beat any CV. Ask three things: were the claimed responsibilities really theirs, how did they behave under year-end pressure, and would you hire them again. For any role touching cash or bank access, treat reference checking as mandatory.

From day one, set the controls: segregation of duties so that posting, payment approval and banking access never sit with one person; bank statements and alerts copied directly to the owner; the monthly reconciliation reviewed by someone other than its preparer; portal credentials owned by the company, not the individual; and written procedures so that no task lives only in one person's head. This is not distrust — it protects the accountant as much as the company, as covered in internal controls and fraud prevention.

A probation period with written targets

One to three months is enough, but it needs defined goals: close one full month and produce a trial balance, file payroll and insurance without errors, and deliver the first monthly management report. If those three have not happened by the end, the issue is rarely training.

Key takeaways

• Write down workload, scope, tools and monthly outputs before advertising.
• Match the level of the role to the actual need instead of hoping one person covers everything.
• Ask the twelve questions with pre-set weightings and discount general answers with no examples.
• A one-hour practical test is more revealing than several interviews.
• Put segregation of duties and independent review of reconciliations in place immediately.