How to write it
Put the qualification where it can't be missed
CPA, ACCA, CIMA, CA and their equivalents are hard filters in accounting recruitment. Put the letters after your name or in your title line, and give the licence its own entry with the jurisdiction and year.
If you're mid-qualification, say so precisely: "ACCA, 11 of 13 papers complete, finalist 2026". Vagueness here is read as a gap, and studying candidates are actively hired — but only if the recruiter can tell where you are.
The close cycle is your headline metric
Every accounting hiring manager cares how fast and how clean your month-end is, because it's the rhythm their team lives by. Days to close, with a before and after, is the single most persuasive number you can put on the page.
"Reduced the close from 12 days to 5" implies process design, automation, reconciliation discipline and stakeholder wrangling, all without spending a word on any of them. Add the entity count and revenue and the reader knows exactly what you can handle.
- Days to close, before and after
- Entities, subsidiaries or currencies consolidated
- Annual revenue or assets on the books you own
- Transaction volume — invoices, payments, journals per month
- Audit outcomes: clean opinions, adjustments, control findings
Clean audits are worth saying out loud
"Three consecutive clean audits with no material adjustments" is a sentence that means something specific to everyone who will read it, and it's the closest accounting has to a performance record.
The same is true of controls work: a SOX deficiency remediated, a control you designed, a variance you eliminated. Reconciliation problems are the recurring nightmare of corporate accounting, so "eliminated a recurring $400k unexplained variance" reads as genuinely valuable rather than as routine.
The ERP name is a keyword, not a detail
Accounting postings screen on systems: NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, Sage, QuickBooks, Workday Financials. A team running NetSuite is searching for NetSuite, and a resume that says "ERP systems" matches nothing.
Implementation and migration experience is worth more still, because it's rare and painful. If you've been through one, name the system, the scope and the history migrated.
Automation is the modern accounting differentiator
The profession is being reshaped by automation, and an accountant who builds it rather than fears it is positioned well. Recurring journals automated, a reconciliation macro, a Power Query model replacing manual compilation, hours removed per close.
Quantify it in hours per close or per month. "Automated 14 recurring journal entries and the fixed asset roll-forward, saving 30 hours per close" is a bullet that says both accounting and process engineering, which is where the roles are going.