What finance panels look for

Finance panels are different from other panels: the finance manager sits on them, and she has read your CV looking for three things. Accuracy: do you find the 12-dollar difference, or do you round it away? Controls: do you know why the person who requests a payment must not be the one who approves it? Integrity: what do you do when someone with power asks you to bend a rule?

• NGOs and UN agencies add donor rules. Each grant has a budget, a period and a list of eligible costs. A finance officer who says “donor compliance”, “budget-versus-actual” and “supporting documents” in the first five minutes is speaking the panel's language.
• Banks and microfinance add compliance: KYC (knowing who the customer is), cash limits, dual control of the vault, and the daily balancing of every teller.
• Trading companies, hotels and telecoms add stock, sales reconciliations and mobile money: matching the day's sales to the cash, the card machine and the mobile money statement.

The typical process: a written or Excel test of 45 to 90 minutes before the panel, then a panel of three to five including the finance manager. The Excel test is almost always one of three tasks: a bank reconciliation (find why the cash book and the statement disagree), a budget variance table (calculate and explain the differences), or a journal exercise (post ten transactions and produce a trial balance). Practise all three the week before; SUM, SUMIF and VLOOKUP are expected.

1. 1How to describe your systems truthfully. Name the system and your real level: “I used QuickBooks daily for two years: posting, bank reconciliation and the monthly reports. I have not set up a chart of accounts.” Panels respect the limit; they distrust “expert in everything”.
2. 2Give one task per tool. Excel for the budget-versus-actual sheet; the mobile money merchant portal for the daily statement; the bank's online platform for downloading statements.
3. 3Mention a reconciliation you did between two of them, because that is the real skill: “Every morning I matched the mobile money statement to our sales sheet; differences over 5 dollars went to the supervisor the same day.”