A free accountant résumé example, and the figures that belong on it
One complete accountant résumé, written out in full. The person is invented. The reading and the score come from the product itself.
— close days, entities, adjustments. that is the job.
Accountancy is one of the few professions where almost every sentence can carry a number, and a surprising number of accountants' résumés carry none. This example is written out in full so you can read the lines, then put through the tools here so you can see what a parser and a scorer make of them. The candidate is invented.
The example, in full
An invented person. Not a real document, and not yours.
Gideon Marchbank
Management Accountant
Leeds, United Kingdom · [email protected] · +44 113 496 0288
Summary
Management accountant with eleven years in manufacturing and retail, working on month-end, margin and the reconciliations nobody had ever written down. ACCA qualified since 2019 and responsible for four entities.
Experience
Management Accountant · Thornewick Foods, Leeds · 2020 to present
- Closed month-end for 4 entities and brought the close from 9 working days down to 5 across 2 reporting cycles.
- Rebuilt the margin pack for 6 product groups so the board reads a variance it can act on inside a week.
- Reduced stock write-off by 18% after reconciling 3 warehouse accounts that nobody had agreed for 2 years.
- Prepared 12 VAT returns a year and cleared 2 legacy queries that had sat open with the tax office since 2019.
- Trained 3 assistant accountants on the new close timetable and wrote the working papers that the external audit now reads first.
Assistant Accountant · Calderbrook Retail Group, Wakefield · 2016 to 2020
- Reconciled 14 bank accounts a month and cut unexplained items from 220 to under 20 within 2 quarters.
- Built the rolling 13-week cash forecast the group still uses for its facility reporting to the bank.
- Delivered the audit file 2 years running with no adjustment raised by the auditors on either occasion.
- Automated the sales ledger upload from 22 stores and saved 8 hours a week of manual keying.
- Supported the stock count at 5 sites and reduced counting variances by 34% from one year to the next.
Accounts Assistant · Calderbrook Retail Group, Wakefield · 2014 to 2016
- Processed 900 purchase invoices a month under 3-way matching and held the query rate at 1%.
- Cleared an aged creditor backlog of 340 invoices over 4 months without a single supplier stopping supply.
- Produced the weekly sales report for 22 stores and issued it every Monday for 2 years without a miss.
- Handled 60 supplier calls a week and resolved 9 in every 10 of them without passing anything to the ledger manager.
- Wrote the first documented procedure for the purchase ledger, and the team at Calderbrook follows that procedure to this day.
Education
BSc Accounting and Finance · Kirkstall Business School, Leeds · 2012 to 2015
Skills
month-end close, management reporting, margin analysis, reconciliations, VAT returns, budgeting and forecasting, audit preparation, SAP, Microsoft Excel, Power BI
Languages
English · native · French · B1
Certifications
ACCA, qualified · 2019
Advanced Excel for Finance · Kirkstall Business School · 2017
Close days, entities, adjustments
Those three words are most of what a finance director wants to know about a management accountant. The example answers all three inside its first block: four legal entities, a close brought from nine working days down to five across two reporting cycles, and working papers the external audit now reads first. The role beneath it adds the audit file delivered two years running with no adjustment raised.
The second thing a reader looks for is whether you have ever found anything. Two lines do that work: stock write-off down 18% after reconciling three warehouse accounts nobody had agreed in two years, and unexplained items across fourteen bank accounts taken from 220 to under 20 inside two quarters. A line like that is worth more than a paragraph about attention to detail, because it is the same claim with evidence attached.
Systems belong in the skills row, not the summary
SAP, Excel and Power BI sit in a skills row of ten entries. The experience lines name what happened in them: twelve VAT returns a year with two legacy queries cleared, a sales ledger upload automated across twenty-two stores for eight hours a week saved. Software on its own is a filter term; software attached to an outcome is evidence.
The assistant accountant role keeps five lines of its own, and so does the accounts assistant role under it, because early finance work is where reconciliation experience is proved. An aged creditor backlog of 340 invoices cleared over four months without a supplier stopping supply is a fact a hiring manager can imagine. The guide on certifications covers where the qualification and its year should sit.
Skills for an accountant résumé, grouped
Gideon's ten skills sort into what finance teams actually hire for. Reporting: month-end close, management reporting, margin analysis, budgeting and forecasting. Control: reconciliations, VAT returns, audit preparation. Systems: SAP, Excel, Power BI. Three groups tell a finance director in one glance whether you close books, keep them clean, or both.
The qualification stays out of the skills row entirely. ACCA belongs in certifications with its year, where both a reader and a parser look for it. In the builder, set Skills to In groups and name the groups to match your own practice: audit, tax and advisory read better than one list for someone from practice.
From accounts assistant to finance manager
At assistant level the résumé proves accuracy and volume: invoices processed, ledgers reconciled, a backlog cleared, as the Calderbrook roles do. At management accountant level the unit becomes the close and the decision it informs: days to close, entities covered, a margin question the reporting answered.
Heading toward financial controller or finance manager, add the people and the process you own: the team you review, the controls you designed, the audit you led rather than supported. Keep one line per role that shows you found something others missed, because that is the evidence a finance director trusts. The guide to quantifying achievements helps turn routine work into counted lines.
How it reads and scores
The import review reads 3 roles, 1 degree, 2 languages and 10 skills before anything reaches the editor. The ATS checker scored it 96 out of 100, re-measured on 25 September 2026, with achievement quality 5 points short and readable volume 4 points short. The writing check scored it 95, which is 91 of the 96 points that applied here, and the five it withheld are one rule: bullet tense. How our examples are made explains the import review and the scoring behind these figures.
What this example leaves off
No systems proficiency table, no reference line, no photograph and no objective. A finance director reading forty applications is looking for close days, entity counts and a qualification, and every additional element competes with those for the same two minutes of attention.
Software versions are left off as well. Naming SAP is useful; naming a module and a release number is a sentence that ages badly and tells a reader nothing they can act on. The same applies to a list of every accounting standard you have worked under, which is assumed from the sector and the years.
What to change for your own
Swap the sector first. Practice, public sector, charity and industry all use this shape with different nouns. Then put in your own close days, entity counts, reconciliation volumes and audit outcomes. If you work in practice, count clients and portfolio size instead of entities.
Keep the qualification visible with a year. Keep the skills row to ten. The design gallery holds 37 layouts if Ledger is too plain for your taste. The data analyst example, the marketing manager example and the customer service example carry the same structure over different evidence.
Write yours beside it
Opens the builder with Gideon's example loaded, saved as its own entry in the Ledger design. Replace every line with your own. Free, no account.
Use this exampleCheck a résumé insteadQuestions
- Is Gideon Marchbank a real accountant
- No. He is invented for this page, and so are Thornewick Foods and Calderbrook Retail Group. The figures demonstrate a shape and describe nobody.
- Where should the qualification go
- In its own certifications line with a year, not buried in a summary sentence. The reader stores certifications as a section, and a finance recruiter looks for the letters and the date before anything else.
- Is a part-qualified candidate at a disadvantage on this shape
- No. Write the stage and the date you expect to finish, and keep the experience lines exactly as they are. The evidence is the same evidence.
- What did the checker score it
- 96 out of 100, re-measured on 25 September 2026, with achievement quality 5 points short and readable volume 4 points short. The arithmetic is 100 × 30% for parseability + 100 × 30% for completeness + 91 × 40% for content, on three dated roles, fifteen action-led lines and 400 readable words. The writing check scored it 95, which is 91 of the 96 points that applied.
- Can I write about an audit I supported
- Yes, in the form the example uses: what you prepared, and what the outcome was. An audit file delivered two years running with no adjustment raised is a fact about your workpapers, and it is the sort of line a finance director reads twice.
- Which design is this rendered in
- Ledger, one of the 24 ATS-safe layouts out of 37. It is also one of the eight chosen on 2026-09-14 from a measurement of every layout's own export: dated columns set without a table, which is the part of a two-column look that breaks extraction.
Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 22 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.