client advisory services

Client Advisory Services Are Growing Fast. Is Your Accounting Firm Ready?

Accounting firms are increasingly looking beyond bookkeeping, tax preparation, and compliance work for their next source of growth. The numbers suggest many are finding it in Client Advisory Services (CAS).

According to the 2024 CPA.com and AICPA PCPS Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey, participating CAS practices reported a 17% median growth rate, continuing a pattern of double-digit growth seen in previous surveys.

But the firms surveyed don’t expect that momentum to stop.

Respondents projected 15% median growth for the following year and 99% median growth in CAS revenue over the next three years.

In other words, the typical participating firm expected its advisory business to nearly double.

Why are accounting firms investing so heavily in advisory?

Part of the answer may be found in another major trend transforming accounting: artificial intelligence and automation.

The Foundation of Accounting Is Becoming More Automated

Bookkeeping and tax preparation aren’t going away.

Small businesses will continue to need accurate financial records, reconciliations, tax returns, payroll, financial statements, and other essential services.

But technology is changing how much human labor is required to produce them.

AI and automation can already assist with tasks including transaction categorization, data extraction, account reconciliations, invoice processing, financial reporting, and tax-form preparation.

According to Intuit’s 2025 QuickBooks Accountant Technology Survey, 95% of surveyed accountants said their firms had adopted automation technologies during the previous year. Payroll, accounts payable and receivable, and data entry and transaction processing were among the leading applications.

That creates tremendous opportunities for efficiency.

It can also contribute to the commoditization of foundational accounting tasks.

When software makes a service faster and easier to provide, clients may have more providers and technology solutions to choose from. Competing solely on completing the task can become increasingly difficult.

The value of the accounting professional therefore has an opportunity to move somewhere else.

AI Can Produce Information. Clients Still Need Help Using It.

Imagine a small business owner receiving an automatically generated financial report.

They can see revenue increased 12%.

They can see labor expenses increased 18%.

They can see that cash decreased from the previous quarter.

They have the information.

Now come the harder questions:

Why did it happen?

Should I be concerned?

What should I change?

Can I still afford to hire another employee?

Do I need to raise my prices?

Which part of my business is actually making money?

Those aren’t simply bookkeeping questions.

They’re advisory questions.

Client Advisory Services move accounting professionals beyond producing financial information and toward helping business owners interpret that information, understand their options, and make better decisions.

That can include services such as cash flow management, forecasting, profitability analysis, KPI monitoring, pricing strategy, budgeting, strategic planning, and recurring advisory meetings.

Technology can help produce the numbers.

The advisor helps determine what to do about them.

Accounting Firms Are Already Making the Transition

The growth in CAS isn’t occurring in isolation from the rise of AI.

Intuit’s 2025 research found that 79% of surveyed accountants expected strategic advisory work to increase over the following year, with those respondents anticipating an average increase of 38%.

Meanwhile, 95% said technology had significantly reduced time spent on compliance tasks and increased their focus on strategic advice and client relationships.

The two trends can reinforce each other.

Automation reduces the time required for certain traditional tasks.

That creates capacity.

Accounting professionals can use that capacity to provide higher-value services.

Instead of spending hours assembling financial information, they can spend more time interpreting it and talking with the client about the business.

That’s an important distinction.

AI doesn’t necessarily eliminate the accountant’s value. It can change where that value is created.

CAS Can Change the Client Relationship

Traditional accounting engagements can sometimes be transactional.

A client needs a tax return.

You prepare it.

The engagement ends.

Or a client needs bookkeeping.

You reconcile the accounts and produce the reports.

Advisory creates an opportunity for a different relationship.

A business owner may meet with their advisor every month to discuss cash flow, profitability, KPIs, goals, and upcoming decisions.

The advisor begins to understand not only the client’s financial statements but also the business itself.

What is the owner trying to accomplish?

What’s preventing growth?

Where is the company losing money?

What opportunities should it pursue?

Over time, the accountant can become someone the business owner consults before making important decisions instead of after making them.

That’s the trusted-advisor relationship at the heart of CAS.

The Revenue Opportunity Is Growing Too

The 17% CAS growth figure isn’t the only noteworthy finding from the CPA.com/AICPA benchmark.

Median reported annual CAS revenue among respondents increased 61% from the previous 2022 survey to approximately $1.6 million.

Median net client fees per professional reached $156,250, a 29% increase from the 2022 survey.

And firms providing more sophisticated services appear to be seeing additional benefits.

Practices generating significant revenue from CFO-level or higher-level business-insight advisory services reported more than 30% higher monthly recurring revenue.

That reinforces an important point:

The opportunity isn’t simply to add another accounting task to your service menu.

It’s to move further into the business owner’s decision-making process.

Bookkeeping and Tax Become the Foundation for Advisory

For bookkeepers and tax professionals, CAS doesn’t require abandoning the work you already do.

In many cases, that work gives you an advantage.

A bookkeeper already understands the client’s revenue, expenses, cash position, receivables, financial statements, and historical performance.

A tax professional develops another valuable perspective on the client’s financial activity and business decisions.

You already have access to the numbers.

Advisory asks you to take the next step.

Bookkeeping tells you what happened.

Tax preparation helps address the tax consequences of what happened.

Advisory helps the client decide what should happen next.

That makes advisory a natural extension of the accounting relationship rather than an entirely separate profession.

Develop Advisory Skills With Profit & Growth Expert Training

Knowing accounting, however, doesn’t automatically mean knowing how to advise a business owner.

Advisory requires another collection of skills.

You need to know how to analyze financial performance, manage cash flow, identify profitability opportunities, ask productive questions, lead client conversations, establish goals, and turn financial insights into practical recommendations.

That’s the purpose behind Universal Accounting Center’s Profit & Growth Expert (PGE) training.

PGE provides a pathway for bookkeepers, tax professionals, accountants, and aspiring firm owners who want to expand into business advisory services.

The program helps professionals learn how to use financial information to work with small business owners on cash flow, profitability, goals, and growth. It complements the technical foundation available through Universal Accounting Center’s Professional Bookkeeper (PB) and Professional Tax Preparer (PTP) programs.

Rather than viewing these skills as competing services, they can become layers of a more complete accounting practice.

PB provides the bookkeeping foundation.

PTP develops tax preparation expertise.

PGE helps professionals turn financial knowledge into advisory services.

That combination can allow an accounting professional to become a much more comprehensive resource for a small business owner.

The Opportunity Is Moving Up the Value Chain

AI is going to continue changing accounting.

Trying to compete with technology at the tasks technology performs most efficiently may become increasingly difficult.

But accountants have another option.

Use the technology.

Let automation handle more of the repetitive work. Use the time it saves to understand clients more deeply, ask better questions, interpret their financial information, and help them make better decisions.

The growth of Client Advisory Services suggests accounting firms are already moving in that direction.

CAS practices in the CPA.com/AICPA benchmark reported 17% median growth.

They projected nearly double their CAS revenue over three years.

And broader industry research shows accountants expect strategic advisory work to continue expanding.

The opportunity for accounting professionals isn’t simply to produce the numbers faster.

It’s to become more valuable once those numbers are produced.

For professionals who want to make that transition, Universal Accounting Center’s Profit & Growth Expert training offers a pathway from accounting professional to trusted business advisor.

Call 435-344-2060 if you’d like to talk with our team to pursue advisory work further with the Profit & Growth Expert certification.

Practice Management in Accounting

What Is Practice Management in Accounting and Why Does It Matter?

Accounting professionals spend years mastering tax law, bookkeeping principles, and financial reporting, yet many still struggle to run their own practice smoothly once they go out on their own. That gap is exactly what practice management addresses. In this post, we will answer the most common questions about what practice management actually means in an accounting context, why it matters more than technical skill alone, and how to start building stronger habits into your own firm.

What Does Practice Management Actually Mean?

Practice management refers to the systems, processes, and habits that keep an accounting or bookkeeping firm running efficiently, separate from the technical accounting or tax work itself. This includes client onboarding processes, workflow scheduling, deadline tracking, staff management if you have employees, and the overall operational structure that determines whether work gets done smoothly or chaotically.

Many accountants assume that being excellent at the technical work automatically translates into running a successful practice, but the two skill sets are genuinely different. A brilliant tax preparer with no organizational systems in place can still miss deadlines, lose track of client communications, or burn out from disorganized workflows, regardless of how skilled they are with the actual numbers.

This gap surprises a lot of new practitioners specifically because their training usually focuses almost entirely on technical competence. Tax law, bookkeeping standards, and software skills get plenty of attention during education, while the operational side of actually running a practice often gets left for people to figure out through trial and error once they are already working with real clients.

Track Every Deadline in One Central Place

Poor practice management creates problems that compound over time, even for technically skilled professionals. Missed deadlines damage client trust. Disorganized client communication leads to misunderstandings about scope and pricing. Inconsistent processes make it difficult to bring on additional staff, since there is no repeatable system for them to follow.

Strong practice management, on the other hand, creates the kind of consistency that lets a firm grow sustainably. When systems are in place for onboarding, communication, and workflow tracking, a firm can take on more clients without everything becoming chaotic, and it can bring on new staff members who can actually follow an established process rather than learning everything through trial and error.

What Are the Core Components of Practice Management?

Client onboarding is often the first piece worth systematizing, since a consistent onboarding process ensures nothing important gets missed when bringing on a new client, from collecting necessary documents to setting clear expectations about communication and deliverables from the very beginning.

Workflow and deadline tracking matter just as much, particularly for firms handling multiple clients with different filing dates or reporting schedules. Without a clear system for tracking what is due when, even a small number of clients can start to feel overwhelming during busy periods like tax season.

Client communication protocols round out the core components, establishing how often clients hear from you, through what channels, and what response time they can expect. Clear protocols here prevent the kind of ad hoc, inconsistent communication that leaves clients uncertain about where things stand.

Document management deserves its own attention as well, since accounting work involves collecting, organizing, and securely storing sensitive client documents throughout the year. A clear system for where documents live and how they move through your workflow prevents the frustrating scramble that happens when an important file cannot be located right before a deadline.

Organize and Secure Your Client Documents

A firm without solid practice management tends to hit a ceiling fairly quickly, since the owner’s personal capacity becomes the limiting factor on how much work the firm can handle. Every new client adds complexity that has to be managed manually, without repeatable systems to fall back on.

Firms with strong practice management, by contrast, can scale more predictably. New staff can be trained against documented processes rather than shadowing the owner indefinitely, and the firm’s value becomes less dependent on any single person’s memory or personal habits. This distinction matters enormously for anyone thinking beyond their first few years in a career in professional tax preparation and toward building something larger over time.

This also affects what happens if you ever want to sell your practice or bring on a partner. A firm that runs on documented systems is far easier to value and transfer than one that exists entirely in the owner’s head, since a buyer or partner needs confidence that the business will keep functioning smoothly without that one person’s constant involvement.

Practice Management

How Do You Start Improving Practice Management?

Start small rather than trying to overhaul everything at once. Pick one area, such as client onboarding or deadline tracking, and build a simple, documented process around it before moving to the next area. Trying to fix every operational weakness simultaneously often leads to abandoning the effort entirely once it starts to feel overwhelming.

Firms genuinely interested in maximizing their long term value often study frameworks like the value builder approach, which emphasizes building systems and processes that make a business valuable and sellable, rather than one that depends entirely on the founder’s daily personal involvement to function.

Building Practice Management Into Your Training Path

For those still early in their accounting or tax preparation career, it is worth thinking about practice management skills alongside technical training rather than treating them as separate concerns to figure out later. Understanding how to structure client relationships and workflows from the beginning saves significant frustration once you actually start building a client base of your own.

Universal Accounting School incorporates this practical, operational thinking into its training, recognizing that technical accounting skill and the ability to run an organized, growing practice are both essential for long-term success in this field, not just one or the other in isolation.

Practice management is not the exciting part of accounting work, but it is often what determines whether a technically skilled professional builds a thriving, sustainable practice or struggles under the weight of disorganized systems as their client base grows. Investing time in these operational habits early pays dividends throughout your entire career.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is practice management the same as bookkeeping or accounting itself?

No, practice management refers to the operational systems that run your firm, while accounting and bookkeeping refer to the actual technical financial work itself.

2. Do solo practitioners need practice management systems?

Yes, even solo practitioners benefit significantly from documented onboarding and deadline tracking processes, since disorganization affects client trust regardless of firm size.

3. What is the first practice management area I should improve?

Client onboarding is often the best starting point, since a consistent process here prevents missed information and sets clear expectations from the very beginning.

4. Can good practice management help me grow my firm faster?

Yes, documented systems allow you to bring on staff or additional clients without everything depending entirely on your personal memory and daily involvement.

5. Is practice management something I can learn alongside technical training?

Yes, building operational thinking into your training early helps you avoid the disorganization that often catches new practitioners off guard later on.