Why Advisory Opportunities Emerge from Core CAS Offerings

We want to offer outsourced CFO and advisory services.

It has become an increasingly more common intent of accounting firms of all sizes. Technology automation, artificial intelligence, and more innovative solutions seem to make it even more logical for accountants to feel that the future is more about advisory services than ever before.

If you have similar intentions and goals, please answer this question:

What type of advice do you give to your clients, periodically and regularly?

Or turn it around and answer this question:

What type of advice do your clients seek from you and when?

If you could think of 5-10 different actionable insights you regularly deliver to your clients, congratulations! But if not, do not worry. It is not difficult to lay a strong foundation for your advisory services.

What is (valuable) advice?

The dictionary defines “advise” as: “to give (someone) a recommendation about what should be done.”

In the context of accounting advisory services, three keywords can help you define and create your advisory services practice.

• Recommendation:?You leverage your professional accounting education, experience, and expertise first to identify choices in any given (clients’) business situation/planning to pick the option that you feel will be the best and then explain to clients why so.
• What:?It is a “definitive” word. When it comes to accounting advisory, the “what” should guide the clients on practical actions they should take to implement your recommendation.
• Should:?(be done) – It is about now or for the future, not about the past (although sometimes it is inevitable to recommend what should have been done.)

How to Create (Valuable) Advice

CAS is more about the positive “impact” of your work on clients’ business (and hence, on their lives). But, of course, the impact is very difficult to deliver if your advice does not help/enable clients to make better business and financial decisions. To discover such valuable advice, you must know what was and is happening in your clients’ businesses.

If you cannot put the past, the present, and the future of clients’ businesses in a connected context, it will be challenging for you to provide advisory services.

Hence, to add/enhance advisory services, you would want to (and should) do as much client accounting work as your firm can. Invariably, your CAS offering will revolve around your clients’ business processes – from an accounting standpoint.

While you are “processing” the accounting information emerging from the business processes of your clients, if you learn to connect the dots, you will be able to:

• Get a far better understanding of your client’s current business performance.
• Analyze, in near real-time (not after the fact), how and why they have the financials they have now (relating the numbers to the business decisions clients made or did not make).
• Identify possible choices for clients to consider.
• Recommend which option you professionally feel is better and why.

Advisory Services Emerge from CAS

Every accounting client of your firm is constantly making decisions about business choices.

You deliver the “advisory” (knowledge-based action recommendation) input to your clients to make better (and timely) business decisions.

You justify your recommendations based on facts, numbers, trends, and connecting the dots.

Advisory services emerge from CAS because you can uncover useful recommendations more effectively if you provide client accounting services.

No wonder the largest CAS survey in the accounting profession revealed the top 12 services offered by CAS firms. Among these, business advisory services and consulting services are at the #3 spot among CAS firms.

A majority of CAS firms offer “processing” services to be able to provide such advisory services.

The reason is simple: without knowing as quickly as possible what is happening in your clients’ businesses, there is no easy way for you to provide meaningful advice.

Now, if you feel CAS can be too labor- and time-intensive, and hence it may not be as profitable as your firm’s other services, think again. This is where your ability to embrace and implement the powers of newer technologies, automation, and artificial intelligence comes into play.

In my experience of over 18 years of regularly interacting with accounting firms – CAS and non-CAS firms – I routinely observe that the per-staff revenue and profit of CAS firms are much higher than that of non-CAS firms. Combined with the insights discovered from the largest CAS survey, I shared several practically implementable insights in "The Definitive Success Guide to Client Accounting Services (CAS)" - the CAS book bought by accounting professionals from 15 Countries across five Continents.

Advisory services routinely command premium fees, and that is not easily possible unless your firm’s advisors are provided with insights from factual data and information in as real-time as possible.

What is the one piece of advice that your clients absolutely love?