Senior Accountant

LIKELY QUESTIONS

- How have you applied Kenya public sector financial management regulations and reporting requirements in your previous accounting roles?
- Walk us through your process for examining payment vouchers before posting transactions to vote books and budget control records.
- Describe your experience preparing recurrent, development, medium-term expenditure, and revised budgets.
- How do you monitor programme or project expenditure, perform variance analysis, and recommend corrective action?
- What controls do you use when processing imprests, advances, statutory deductions, and imprest surrenders?
- Explain how you prepare, review, and resolve cash and bank reconciliations, including long-outstanding reconciling items.
- Tell us about a financial report, cash flow projection, or investment proposal you prepared that informed management decision-making.
- How do you ensure safe custody, completeness, retrieval, and confidentiality of accounting records, authority documents, and assets?

BEHAVIOURAL QUESTIONS

- Tell us about a time you identified an error, irregularity, or control weakness in a payment process.
Model approach: Situation: Briefly describe the payment process and the issue identified. Task: State your responsibility to protect funds and ensure compliance. Action: Explain how you reviewed supporting documents, checked approvals, budget availability, procurement evidence, tax treatment, and delegated authority; escalated appropriately; and strengthened the control. Result: Quantify the prevented loss, corrected posting, improved turnaround time, or audit outcome.

- Describe a time you had to manage competing reporting deadlines while maintaining accuracy.
Model approach: Situation: Explain the overlapping deadline, such as month-end reports, budget submissions, reconciliations, and statutory remittances. Task: State the required deliverables and consequences of delay. Action: Describe how you prioritised by risk and deadline, created a tracker, delegated or coordinated inputs, performed review checks, and communicated early on dependencies. Result: State that reports were submitted on time, reconciliations were completed, and errors or audit queries were avoided.

- Give an example of when your variance analysis led to a management action.
Model approach: Situation: Identify a project, programme, or cost centre with significant over- or under-expenditure. Task: Explain your role in analysing the variance and advising management. Action: Detail how you compared actuals to approved budget and commitments, investigated root causes with budget holders, forecast the year-end position, and proposed actions such as reallocation, revised estimates, spending controls, or revised work plans. Result: Quantify the savings, improved absorption, avoided overspend, or better delivery outcome.

- Tell us about a time you handled sensitive financial records or assets under strict accountability requirements.
Model approach: Situation: Describe the records, cash, assets, or authority documents involved. Task: State your accountability for security, completeness, and access control. Action: Explain the controls used, such as registers, restricted access, filing protocols, periodic stocktakes, reconciliations, handover procedures, and exception reporting. Result: Highlight clean audit findings, zero loss, faster document retrieval, or improved accountability.

SMART QUESTIONS TO ASK

- What are the most important financial management priorities for this role in the first 6 to 12 months?
- Which reporting frameworks, public financial management requirements, and internal policies will the Senior Accountant work with most frequently?
- What are the main recurring challenges in budget execution, imprest management, reconciliations, or project expenditure monitoring?
- How are responsibilities divided between the Senior Accountant, finance leadership, programme teams, procurement, and internal audit?
- What would success look like at the end of the probation period, and which reports or controls would you expect the successful candidate to improve first?

RED FLAGS TO WATCH FOR

- Unclear approval limits, weak segregation of duties, or expectations that one person will initiate, approve, pay, reconcile, and report on the same transactions.
- Frequent unresolved audit queries, long-outstanding bank reconciliation items, delayed statutory remittances, or a culture of bypassing documentation requirements.
- Vague or unrealistic expectations around budgets, reporting timelines, staffing, systems access, or accountability for assets and imprests.