What 123 Accounting Job Postings Actually Ask For

We pulled every open posting from 49 companies' public job boards, kept the 123 whose title names an accounting role, and counted how many mention each of 30 terms at least once.

The ± figure is a 95% confidence interval. At 123 postings, a reading of 40% means the true rate is somewhere around 31–49% — so treat the ordering as meaningful and small gaps as noise.

NetSuite is the system to name, by a wide margin. It appears in 36.6% of these postings against 13.8% for Oracle, 8.9% for SAP and 0.8% for QuickBooks. The gap is far larger than the margin of error, so this one is not close. Generic accounting resume advice still leads with QuickBooks; these postings almost never mention it.

The CPA is close to table stakes at 67.5%, and 46.3% name Big 4 experience explicitly — not as a nice-to-have buried in the body, but as a stated qualification. If you have either, it belongs at the top of the resume rather than in a credentials footer.

Process vocabulary beats software. Audit appears in 85.4% of postings and reconciliation in 74% — both above every system, and above Excel at 33.3%. A resume that lists tools but never names the close, the reconciliation or the audit is missing the terms most of these postings lead with.

The CMA is never mentioned. Not once in 123 postings. The CPA appears in 67.5%. If you hold a CMA it is still a real credential, but in this segment it is not the one being screened for, and it should not be the qualification your resume leads with.

59.3% ask for process improvement or automation. That is more than SOX, month-end close or internal controls. It is the least likely thing on this list to appear on an accountant's resume, and the easiest gap to close if you have actually done it.

Source. Public job-board APIs that companies expose so their listings can be embedded elsewhere — the Greenhouse job board API and Lever postings API. No scraping, no private data. Any figure here can be re-derived from those endpoints; the collector and analyzer are in the repository.

Selection. Postings whose title contains accountant, accounting, controller or bookkeep. Deduped on company, normalized title and content length, because one role posted to several offices returns several identical records.

Counting. Document frequency — the share of postings mentioning a term at least once, not how often it appears.

This is a narrower sample than it may look. These are in-house accounting teams at 49 mostly technology companies hiring through modern applicant tracking systems. That is a real and reasonably broad slice, but it is not the accounting profession: public accounting firms, government, manufacturing, healthcare finance and small-business bookkeeping are all absent. Read this as “what accounting roles at tech companies ask for,” because that is what it measures.

And it is small. 123 postings gives margins of error between ±6 and ±9 points, shown against every figure. Rankings near the top are robust; two terms a few points apart are not meaningfully different. Terms outside our 30-term list are uncounted, so absence here is not evidence of absence.