Quickbooks, Bookkeeping and Accounting Blog

I have used various of the questions below when interviewing bookkeepers and controllers and have found them to be very useful for assessing a person’s knowledge of QuickBooks, Excel and general accounting/bookkeeping.

General accounting knowledge: 

• Explain the differences between assets and expenses.
  • If a person stumbles, then they don’t understand basic accounting and you don’t want them in charge of your bookkeeping.
• Explain the differences between purchasing a computer and a travel expense, with respect to profitability, cash flow and general accounting.
  • An experienced bookkeeper will undestand depreciation and easily talk about this.

QuickBooks: 

• Walk through the process of invoicing and collecting from a customer in QuickBooks
  • An experienced user of QuickBooks will mention creating an invoice, receiving payment and making a deposit, QuickBooks aging reports and QuickBooks pre-written collection letters.
• How would you use QuickBooks to track or manage employees time?
  • QuickBooks has some nifty time tracking features. Some experienced QuickBooks users might never have had the opportunity to use them, but if someone can readily explain how they are used, that is a great sign.
• Scenario: you are coming into a company that has always done everything by hand and you are tasked with setting them up with QuickBooks.  How many expense accounts would you create and why.
  • I ask this because I want to see if they understand the business reasons for having multiple expense accounts. Many businesses create way too many accounts, creating lots of headaches and making it difficult to make sense of their financial numbers

Excel:

• Scenario: you have a spreadsheet with information on 1,000 homes.  One of the columns lists the color of each home.  How would you figure out how many of the homes are blue?
  • There are lots of ways to accomplish this and a reasonably experienced Excel user should be able to come up with at least one way immediately.
• Gage familiarity with some key functions (subtotal, sort, filter).

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General Business Knowledge:

• You have a friend who is considering purchasing a company and she asks you to look at the numbers and let her know what you think.  What do you do?
  • There is no right answer to this question. I usually let people talk for a few minutes to see if they have ideas as to what to look for and to listen to them think out loud.