Advice and guides / For candidates
Accounts executive interview questions that actually get asked
Not the hundred question lists. These are the five or six that come up in almost every accounts executive interview, and what a good answer has in it.
Accounts interviews in India are fairly predictable, which is good news. The questions are not designed to catch you out. They are designed to find out whether you have closed a real month in a real company, because that is what the job is.
"Walk me through your month end close"
This is the question. Everything else is secondary. A good answer is a sequence, in your order, with dates attached: when provisions go in, when the bank reconciliation happens, when inter company entries are passed, when the schedules go to the reviewer, when the books lock.
The strongest version adds the thing that most often went wrong. Late vendor invoices, an inter company mismatch that appeared every quarter, one branch that never sent its expense claims on time. Naming the recurring problem is what separates someone who did the close from someone who read about it.
"How do you handle a bank reconciliation that will not tie?"
They want method, not the answer. Start from the difference, then work it: uncleared cheques, entries on one side only, wrong dates, a transposed figure, bank charges not booked. Say out loud that you check the difference against common error patterns first, because a transposition is divisible by nine and that takes ten seconds to rule in or out.
GST and TDS questions
- Which returns you filed yourself, and which you only prepared the working for. Be exact. This is checked easily.
- What you do when a vendor does not upload an invoice and your input credit does not reflect.
- TDS sections you have actually deducted under, and at what rates. Two you know well beats six you have heard of.
- What happens at reconciliation between your books and the portal, and who fixes the mismatch.
"How many invoices or entries did you handle?"
A volume question, and an honest range is the right answer. Forty a day, three hundred a month, whatever it was. Volume tells the employer whether you have worked at their scale, and there is no advantage in inflating it, because the follow up is about how you managed that volume.
The Excel question
Expect to be asked to do something small and real: a lookup across two sheets, a pivot on a ledger extract, finding duplicates in a vendor master. Nobody is testing macros. They are testing whether you can handle a messy extract without asking someone for help.
"Why are you leaving?"
Keep it short and forward facing. Scope, learning, stability, distance. Do not run down your current employer, not because it is dishonest, but because the interviewer is imagining how you will talk about them in two years.
What to prepare tonight
One close, in order, with dates. One problem that recurred and what you did about it. Your volumes. Two TDS sections and two GST situations you have personally handled. That is an hour of preparation and it covers most of what gets asked.
Accounts roles are among the most common ones we fill. You can see the accounting executive brief and salary bands, or the bookkeeper one, and apply when you are ready.