Dobrý prodejce – anglicky
Good accountants – what skills, abilities and personal qualities do they need ?
I think it is quite difficult to decide or judge who is a good accountant. Is it the accountant who gives a real, objective picture of a company or the foxy accountant who can evaluate assets with the most profitable value and calculate high costs so that his employer spent then less money on taxes ? Many employers would choose the socond one, but we assume that the best accountant is a honest accountant as well. So the first personal quality the good accountant should have is honesty.
Maybe a better word for this quality would be probity because the accountant have to be constant to some rules given by law and also to some other accounting principles.
Ideal bookkeeper is certainly intelligent and can make logic decisions and it is expected that he can choose always the right solution when more variants or procedures (for example for valuating stock) are possible.
I am not sure he must be good at mathematics, I would say that nowadays is much more important for an accountant to work with a computer and understand the bookkeeping software, because today every company uses a computer for keeping records.
It is necessary in bookkeeping to be orderly, because the accountant have to file away all the accounting documents and he have to use them as an evidence. During the accounting period (usually one year) there are plenty of different papers which he should sort out and then know where they just are.
Another quality, I do not have, which is needed for an accounant is patience. He have to spend long hours with calculating different financial statements and when assets do not equal liabilities then he should stay cool and patiently recount everything and search for mistakes and neglected facts. Also repeated chek-ups and revisions require permanent attention.
I think a bookkeeper should be also diplomatic and in reports for shareholders and owners of the company he should be able to stress the successes and favourable data of the last period and this is not out of keeping with the giving objective picture of a company.
These are the skills and personal qualities I think a good accountant needs, but I really do not know if they are so important, maybe some owner of a company or bookkeeper would mention completly different abilities and he would be right, because my experience with accounting are only theoretical.