Accounts Payable Specialist Resume Examples in 2023

Accounts Payable Specialist Resume Examples

Years of Experience

How to Write a Better Accounts Payable Specialist Resume

Your resume has one purpose: to get you interviews for jobs you want. You can ensure your resume serves that purpose by focusing on your most relevant skills and displaying them as clearly as possible. The tips below will help you give your resume the focus and clarity it needs to advance your job search.

Focus on your relevant accounts payable background

To write a great resume, you’ll need to first take the full measure of your relevant background. Follow these three steps:

Step 1: For each job in your work history, brainstorm and jot down the various duties and highlights you can remember. Don’t worry yet whether the details you’re jotting down are relevant or well-organized. The point here is to generate plenty of information you can then curate.

Step 2: Now with everything in front of you, go through and remove any details that don’t speak to your target job. Review each detail one by one, always answering the same question: Does this overlap with the duties you’ll have as an accounts payable specialist? When in doubt, move the detail to a separate document so it’s no longer part of your writing process.

Step 3: Organize and format your remaining details as the basis for your resume.

The order of these steps is important. Don’t start reviewing and removing details until you’ve brainstormed plenty about your positive work experiences. And don’t start organizing details until you’re done removing the irrelevant ones. Otherwise, you’ll probably waste time polishing up work details that you just delete later on.

Make your numbers stand out

The average reader of a resume doesn’t really “read” it in the normal sense. Rather, they quickly scan down the page, looking for details that jump out as impressive and relevant to their hiring needs. For this reason, you should present your career details in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand even at a glance. Here are three simple ways to do that:

• To abbreviate large dollar amounts, use “K” for thousand, “M” for million, and “B” for billion.
• Use % for percentages and # for performance rankings.
• Use the numeral form to express all numbers from two up, and only spell out the numbers zero and one. (This practice differs from normal prose, where you spell out numbers zero through ten and use the numeral form for all numbers from 11 up.)

Examples:

Negotiated early payment plan with one vendor that reduced total expenditures by $2M

Cleared 6-month backlog, resolving 30 accounting errors

Avoid non-AP/AR jargon

Any time you use a long word when a short word would do, that’s jargon. A classic example: People use the words “utilize” or “utilization” when they should use “use”.

Jargon is especially tempting in finance, where plenty of specialized terms (like “amortization”) may not actually have a shorter option. These terms deserve a spot on your resume, as long as they’re relevant to your goals. The problem is when you let words that should be short and simple become words (often ending in “-tion” or “-ment”) that are long and clunky.

Companies and other authorities use jargon all the time to soften the blow of bad news. For instance, General Motors once described a plant shutdown as a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment”. (You’ll find this and many other examples of corporate jargon in William Zinsser’s classic book “On Writing Well”.)

Take the opposite approach on your resume. Your goal with this document isn’t to conceal bad news, but to share the good news of your candidacy for a job opening. Any time you find yourself using a long word, stop and ask: Is there a shorter synonym? This habit will help make your resume a clear, concise record of what you offer to employers.

Example:

Launched and used QuickBooks software to reduce company-wide payment errors by 90%

Common Key Skills for Accounts Payable Specialist Resumes

Companies looking to fill a position often use an applicant tracking system (ATS). This computer program scans each submitted resume for keywords relevant to the job at hand. When the ATS scans a resume with many relevant keywords, it’s more likely to flag the document for the hiring manager.

For this reason, you should add a keyword-rich “Skills” or “Expertise” section to your resume (as in the examples above). With this section, you can show the breadth of your skillset and boost the chance your application gets noticed. Below are common keywords for an accounts payable specialist:

Common Action Verbs for Accounts Payable Specialist Resumes

One of the most common (yet avoidable) resume mistakes is using too few verbs. When you repeat the same generic verb (say, “Manage”) several times, it distracts the reader and fails to show the dynamic nature of your work. You can prevent this issue by using a healthy variety of action verbs on your resume. Consider the following options:

How to Align Your Resume With a Job Posting

In what industry or sector is the job posting? Do you have any experience in that industry as well? If so, cite that common experience in the first line of your resume’s Profile section.

Example:

Senior Accounts Payable Specialist with 13+ years of experience including 4 years in the manufacturing sector.

If you don’t have experience in the same industry, consider instead adding a line to your Profile that calls out your overall adaptability to new work settings.

Example:

Highly adaptable to new work challenges and industry conditions.