Applying for any job is stressful, but when you are in the world of finance and accounting, you are interviewing for positions that will allow you to take care of huge sums of money, which can make the interview process especially taxing. Here are some commonly asked accounting interview questions and what you can do to prepare for them.

1. If you were working for a company that just received an investment of five million dollars, what would your spending and investing plan be to make the most of it?

This question, or any of its variations, is essentially the interviewer putting you in the position of a senior accountant and seeing how you fare, even if you are only applying for a junior accounting position. It also shows how critically you think about this type of scenario and how well you are able to develop plans that deal with every eventuality. You should have an answer prepared ahead of time that is in line with the current investment and spending habits of the company to which you are applying. Do some research to see how they currently use their money and then create a plan for a large investment based on the percentage spent and percentage invested.

2. Why is it easier for someone to hide fraud if they are keeping an accounting journal rather than a ledger?

There are many different answers to this question, but they all rely on one thing: examples. You need to be able to give examples with regard to how different information is stored in different accounting measures. You could say that it is easier to perpetrate fraud in a journal because you can provide a lot of extraneous details to distract the person who is reading the journal as opposed to the ledger, which is just numbers. Give examples using specific information, such as monetary amounts.

3. Which enterprise resource planning tools have you used?

If you have worked for large companies, chances are excellent that you have used at least one of these types of systems. Think ahead of time and be able to narrow down the exact amount of time that you have spent using such a tool. If you don't have any experience, look these tools up and see what their common features are. Then, think about the current software that you use and draw parallels between some of the features to show that you will be able to learn the tools quickly.

For more information, look at an accounting job board forum.