Soft skills for accountants: 10 skills to build success

What skills do you need to become a successful accountant?

If you answered ‘accounting skills’ or ‘solid mathematics skills’ you would only be half right.

While it’s true that knowledge of accounting principles is essential, succeeding as an accountant takes more than formal education and technical knowledge. To build a thriving business, you must also develop a number of soft skills that would enable you to better serve your clients.

Soft skills for accountants are the interpersonal, organizational, and problem-solving abilities that help accounting professionals explain financial information, manage client relationships, meet deadlines, and deliver clearer advice.

This post compiles 10 essential soft skills for accountants to help you provide more value to clients.

Strong accounting communication skills help clients understand financial information, tax requirements, and business performance without needing an accounting background. Remember that as a financial expert, you rely on the ability to effectively convey critical information to your clients. This includes educating them on tax laws, recapping the performance of their business, and informing them about their financial obligations.

In many cases, the information you present involves a lot of facts and figures that can go over people’s heads if they don’t have a financial background. To that end, you must be able to communicate complex information in a way that’s interesting and relatable to your clients.

When you have strong accounting communication skills, your clients will be able to easily understand important information, which in turn will help them stay on top of their books.

Relationship-building skills help accountants create long-term client trust, which is essential for a service-based business. That connection is often what determines whether clients stay with your firm over time.

For this reason, accountants must hone their relationship-building skills.

The first step to doing that is to get to know your clients better. Gather more information about each individual and their business, and build client profiles that let you track their history.

Also, bear in mind that relationship building isn’t a one-time only activity; it’s something you do over the long term. To that end, keep your client profiles updated and make a point of checking in regularly to ensure each client has their specific needs covered.

Time management skills help accountants track deadlines, balance client work, and keep important obligations from slipping. There are a lot of important dates to track, including tax filing schedules, license renewal periods, and document submission deadlines. You may also need to juggle multiple clients and tasks, so it’s a must that you budget your time and ensure that everything gets done.

Staying on top of all these tasks requires strong time management skills. Be mindful of the time you have and your daily or weekly capacity, and then structure your days in such a way that you’re able to meet all your deadlines and obligations.

To make time management easier, you can leverage time-tracking apps and client engagement platforms such as Ignition, which streamlines tasks like sending proposals and billing customers.

To speed up your engagement process you can take advantage of Ignition’s proposal and engagement letter templates, created by leading industry experts.

Customer service skills help accounting firms retain clients by making support more useful, proactive, and centered on client needs.  Ensuring your approach to this is client-centric will help make client retention efforts more seamless and can strengthen your new and existing client relationships.

So, how exactly do you serve clients better?

Industry data suggests that serving as a strategic advisor or consultant to your clients greatly increases your value to them.

Research by CPA.com found that accounting companies may increase their revenue by up to 50% by offering strategic advisory services. According to the survey, businesses that purchase advisory services from their accountants spend around 43% more per month, compared to companies that don’t buy these services.

CPA.com's survey also found that businesses are willing to pay accountants more for helping them address challenges such as planning for growth and improving cash flow.

Keep these insights in mind when serving your clients. Carefully consider positioning your firm as an advisor or service provider so you can help them run and grow their businesses. Rebecca Mihalic, Ignition’s Head of Accounting and also a practice owner, does most of her client engagements at tax planning time, and finds this is an ideal time to also focus on growth.

“This is when we discuss with clients what’s going on in their business. They may need more help freeing up cash flow or even securing funding for an acquisition. Having that conversation tied to an existing project is more natural than cold calling a client and trying to sell them something,” she says.

Analytical skills help accountants turn financial documents and metrics into practical insights clients can act on. You may need to pore over financial documents to determine how to optimize cash flow for a client. In some instances, you’ll need to analyze metrics such as sales, margins, and expenses to be able to propose measures that can make your clients more profitable.

All of these things require strong analytical skills. You need to look beyond the surface of basic reports to spot trends and surface useful insights.

Organizational skills help accountants manage documents, client details, and moving parts without losing accuracy or trust. Solid organizational skills help you do your best work and build professionalism with your clients.

As such, you must hone your organizational skills and develop the ability to track the many moving parts of your business (and your clients’ businesses). Part of doing this lies in creating systems for tracking and organizing information. Adopt a digital filing system that keeps your documents organized and consider using a client management platform that keeps all of your customer details in check.

In doing so, you can make sure that files and documents are always in the right place, and you can quickly and easily retrieve the right information when the need arises.

Tech skills help accountants keep pace with digital financial services and serve clients through modern, efficient processes. Amy Vetter, CPA/CITP, said it best when she wrote in the Journal of Accountancy that "advanced tech is no longer optional" for accounting firms.

Financial services are increasingly digitized, driven by major initiatives such as Making Tax Digital in the UK and by the global shift in business operations following the COVID-19 pandemic. Tasks such as filing taxes, renewing business licenses, and paying fees or penalties can now be done online.

As an accountant serving businesses today, keeping up with these developments is essential. Being set in your ways and insisting on paper-based processes will not serve you well.

So, strive to develop your tech skills. Learn the fundamentals of accounting and tax software and keep yourself up to date with the digital initiatives of states and government agencies.

Creative problem-solving helps accountants find practical, compliant ways to address client goals and grow their own practices. It’s all about being creative with your problem-solving and business strategies.

When meeting the needs of your clients for example, you’ll sometimes need to think outside the box. Let’s say one of your clients wants to lower their tax bill every year. In this scenario, you can work with them to find creative ways to legally deduct certain business expenses.

Creativity will also help you grow your accounting practice. With the landscape being more competitive than ever, you need to implement unique marketing or advertising strategies to set yourself apart – and that requires imagination and clever vision.

Attention to detail helps accountants protect accuracy and compliance when preparing tax, bookkeeping, and other client work. There’s no room for guesswork when you’re preparing your clients’ taxes or performing bookkeeping services such as categorizing expenses. These things must be done to the letter; otherwise, you risk serious consequences. For example, overstating business expenses can trigger an audit, which is a major pain to deal with.

As such, you must develop a keen eye for detail. When going over your client’s tax forms for instance, you need to be able to effectively review them line by line to make sure all figures are correct.

Being detail-oriented allows you to guarantee the accuracy of your work, thus ensuring that your clients stay compliant with business and tax regulations.

A love of learning helps accountants stay current as laws, tools, and professional requirements change.  Laws are constantly evolving, plus there are always fresh tools and solutions that enter the market.

CPAs are also required to go through ongoing training and improvement activities. In the United States, there’s Continuing Professional Education (CPE), and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in Australia, Canada and the UK. Both activities are designed to help accountants maintain and develop their industry competencies.

All this to say that learning and education are constant in the accounting profession. Being appreciative of the learning process will serve you well in this regard. If you love learning new things, you’ll find it easier to keep up with the latest developments in your field. Not to mention, regularly acquiring new knowledge and skills will allow you to stay relevant with the times.

Ignition now offers a free on-demand Certification Program which is eligible for four hours of verifiable CPD in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and two hours of verifiable CPE in the United States.

Soft skills help accountants stand out, serve clients better, and build a stronger practice alongside technical expertise. Building a thriving accounting firm means continuing to develop the soft skills covered above alongside your technical expertise.

Set yourself up for success with the right tools. Ignition makes it easy to be organized and detail-oriented, so you can focus more on relationship-building with your clients. Watch a demo of Ignition today and see why thousands of accountants use the Ignition client and engagement platform to help run their firms.