Hiring an Accountant Who Really Knows QuickBooks: What to Check
Job ads often ask for QuickBooks proficiency. Here is how small businesses can define, test, and verify that skill before hiring an accountant.
Hiring posts for accountants almost always list “proficiency in QuickBooks” alongside Excel and one or two other packages. For a small business owner, that phrase covers an enormous range: someone who has keyed in invoices, someone who runs a full month-end close, and someone who has never touched the product at all can all put it on a resume. Here is how we suggest pinning down what you actually need and checking that a candidate has it.
Decide which QuickBooks you mean
QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop are different products with different workflows, and a candidate who is fast in one may be slow in the other. Name the specific product in the job posting and screen for it directly. Also note edition-level needs: inventory, payroll, sales tax, and multicurrency each add skills that not every bookkeeper has.
The skills that matter day to day
- Bank feeds and account reconciliation
- Chart of accounts setup and cleanup
- Accounts receivable and payable workflows, including receiving payments and matching deposits
- Journal entries and a repeatable month-end close
- Running and interpreting the core reports: profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow
- Sales tax setup and filing preparation, if you collect it
- Multicurrency, if you buy or sell across borders
A candidate who can do the first five will cover most small-business needs.
Test before you hire
A short hands-on exercise in a sample or trial company file tells you more than any interview answer. Give the candidate a test file with a few deliberate problems: a bank reconciliation that does not balance, a payment applied to the wrong invoice, a deposit sitting in undeposited funds. Ask them to find and fix the issues, then run a profit and loss for a date range and explain what they see. Fifteen to twenty minutes of real work separates genuine users from people who have only watched a demo.
Questions worth asking
- Which QuickBooks product and edition have you used, and for how long?
- Walk me through your month-end close checklist.
- How do you track down a reconciliation discrepancy?
- Have you cleaned up a messy chart of accounts or an undeposited funds backlog?
- Have you moved data into or out of QuickBooks, for example from another accounting package?
Listen for specifics: named reports, named tools, and a story about something that went wrong and how it was fixed.
Red flags
- Cannot say which product or edition they used, only “QuickBooks.”
- Experience is limited to invoice and bill entry, with no reconciliations or close work.
- Claims expert-level skill in every package listed, with no detail behind any of them.
- Cannot describe a single report they built or problem they solved.
Know what sits outside normal bookkeeping
Some QuickBooks tasks are one-off technical jobs rather than ongoing accounting work: recovering a damaged company file, moving a company from QuickBooks Online back to Desktop, condensing a file that has grown too large, or converting from another package. It is reasonable, and usually cheaper, to hire for the daily work and bring in a specialist for those rare events rather than expecting them in your new hire.
Before you post the role, write a one-page list of the tasks the person will own in their first ninety days, then build your screening questions and your practical test straight from that list. You will get a job ad that attracts the right applicants and an interview process that proves it.