Advisory Services: Enhance Value for Clients Through Strategic Partnerships
In the world of business, an accountant or an accounting firm can provide tremendous value to the overall strategic direction of a business. These professionals are the go-to sources for numerous areas like tax, audit & assurance, and risk, but they are even more than that. A CPA skilled in advisory services can reverse engineer the strategic direction of a business by understanding the end goals, reviewing current data, and strategically planning solutions that will help the business achieve its goals. And it is usually more than just some bookkeeping or maintaining financial compliance.
Antiquated Perception of Accounting Roles
The role of an accountant, like any other career path, has evolved over time. Within the past 10-15 years, the world of accounting has morphed and added a segment of service that has changed how clients engage firms. While the scope of services provided can directly impact your clients’ success, advisory services can offer business solutions that are both financially and professionally rewarding.
Traditional accounting roles are evolving, especially as client needs have changed. Accountants were, for so long, viewed as number crunchers that focused on compliance issues. Certified public accountants do know a fair amount about compliance and actively manage numbers so they can analyze, forecast, and advise based on the numbers. As businesses and clients' needs evolve, so does the suite of services that are offered. Strategic partners, or advisors, offer a more complete service that can help clients have someone by their side to guide them, reduce some of the growing pains, and drive towards goals faster.
Advisory Services Demand on CPAs
We have all heard the phrase that “time is money” so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that advisory services are usually more expensive than some of the other transactional services offered from accountants. Along with the enhanced services comes a more significant time commitment for CPAs when they have clients that source them for advisory services. With the time demand being significant, fees associated with advisory services are among some of the largest that CPAs charge.
Coupled with the increasing demand on a CPA’s time, the overall number of CPAs is decreasing. So not only is there more demand and work to go around for advisory services, but there are fewer CPAs to perform the work than before. A CPA’s workload is larger now than it has been, so using tools to help streamline the workload can be an approach to mitigate some of increasing demands. Another option for CPAs is to align with strategic partners that can help ease some of the business advisor burden. Strategic partners for CPAs should be trusted and experienced professionals that will deliver the same quality for a CPA’s client. By working with CPAs, strategic partners can alleviate some of the business and client responsibilities that the CPA would typically be responsible for.
Enhanced Advisory Services
With advisory services in such demand from clients, it makes complete sense for accountants to put packages together that help their clients take advantage of the knowledge and expertise of CPAs to help drive success in their business. That range of services can be immense, and the CPA can help guide the business owner so that they can meet the growth goals of their business. Services like real estate advisory, SBA loan compliance advisory, or business valuation advisory are time consuming activities that require more than just being busy during tax season.
Aligning with a strategic partner, like a trusted payments partner, can open solutions that will reimagine business operations and refresh systems for clients. Bringing new efficiencies to the heart of business will help not only help clients achieve their goals of growth, but also help alleviate some of the burden that CPAs experience while adding a trusted partner that will support clients with the same level of service.
Boost your offerings while reducing some of the heavy strategic lifting and consider aligning with a strategic payments leader that can improve your client’s bottom line while driving a new stream of revenue for you.