Advisory accountants are growing in demand as businesses want more from their financial teams. Business advisory is one of the key ways for accountants to:
- Add intriguing services
- Increase revenue
- Maintain steady workflow
If you’re unsure whether you need business advisory or you’re considering offering these types of services to your clients, the following guide is a must-read.
What Are Business Advisory Services?
Advisory is a specialization in a lot of industries, and “business advisory” is slightly different from “accounting advisory” services. When you discuss business advisory, this will include:
- Identifying strengths
- Identifying weaknesses
- Streamlining operations
- Implementing growth processes
- Helping a business reach its goals
However, what is an accounting business[RE1] and what advisory services do they offer? Accountants are often hired to help businesses with taxes, managing their books and offering insights into a business ’s operations.
However, advisory services leverage the skills that they have to offer financial-related advisory services.
What Services Do Accountants Offer?
On the advisory side of their business, accountants may offer a wide range of services, including but not limited to:
- Improving workflows
- Pricing analysis
- Tech stack planning
- Tech training
- Budgeting
- Cash flow projections and forecasts
- Business planning
- Operation analysis
- Tax planning
- KPI tracking
- Payroll
- HR
An accountant may also offer help with loan applications and other services. It's not uncommon for an accountant to specialize in certain areas that they truly enjoy and believe will benefit their clients the most.
It’s important to know that an advisor is not the same thing as a consultant, although they’re very similar. Consulting services are often a one-off service, meaning that the professional may offer tech training once or a quick review of your tech stack.
Advisors remain by your side and will engage with their clients more often. The goal of the advisor is to help your business grow and remain efficient. The advisor will work with you for a set term, or longer if you choose to renew, and can monitor the progress of your business as a result.
For example, let’s assume that you work with a consultant to put new workflows in place. A week or two later, you may find that 75% of your staff cannot follow these workflows and you need to hire the consultant again.
If you worked with an advisor, they would:
- Review the workflow changes
- Monitor changes
- Tweak them to ensure a smooth transition
Your advisor will engage with you and ensure that your operations are benefiting from their service. Over time, these advisors will help you better run your operations. Consultants will keep helping you on a one-off basis, but they’re not invested in the same way that an advisor will be.
What Advantages Are There of Working With an Advisor?
Working with an advisor is something every business should consider when they have the budget. The advantages of working with an advisor are massive, and the services often pay for themselves, especially in the following ways:
Improve Overall Efficiency
How efficient is your team? If you can improve your workplace’s productivity, you should. A team that runs like a well-oiled machine will help you:
- Deliver products to clients faster
- Maximize revenue
- Take on more clients
Business is filled with time-consuming tasks and processes that may be improved upon and made more efficient. You can work with an advisor to find weaknesses in your overall efficiency and strengthen them.
If you know that there “has to be a better way,” working with an accounting advisor may help you unlock the efficiency in your business that you have long known existed.
Imagine if you had a 10-person workforce and everyone was 10% more efficient. That would be the equivalent of hiring a new employee.
Maximize Possibilities and Chances
Have you missed out on business growth and possibilities? Every business has missed chances to:
- Expand their operations
- Make more sales
- Reach new markets
Even look at Microsoft, one of the largest tech companies in history. The company missed its opportunity to enter the mobile and search engine market until it was too late. Yes, they’re still in the search engine market, but they have nowhere near the market share of Google.
An advisor can help you better understand market trends and possibilities so that you can take advantage of them.
Additionally, they can alert you to potential markets that are “hot” but come with far too much risk to be viable.
Prevent And Reduce Risks
Businesses have risks of all forms. For example, your business may:
- Make the same sales as last year
- Increase sales
- Still struggle with cash flow
An advisor will look through your cash flow statement and conduct customer analysis to learn which clients pay on time and which are always late making payments. You may find that you have 50% of your cash flow stuck in accounts receivables, and this can lead to:
- Risk of missing debt payments
- Risk of taking out high interest loans
When you work with an advisor, they can run forecasts and projections to provide invaluable insights into your operations. Additionally, they can help you prevent risks and improve growth.
Cash flow is just an example of how an advisor can prevent and reduce risks.
They can also run pricing analyses for your new product or service to understand if your target demographic will pay these prices and ensure that you price them enough to earn a profit.
Invest in Technology
Technology can help every business run more efficiently. If you don’t have the right tech stack in place, you’re losing time and/or money. An accounting advisor may offer you tech stack advice and help you invest in technology that:
- Saves your team time
- Improves overall efficiency
- Reduces costs
- Provides valuable insights
- Keeps your business compliant
- And more
If you’re not investing in technology, there’s a good chance that your business will suffer as a result. You need to spend time learning about new technologies, testing them out and understanding how they can fit into your day-to-day operations.
Investing in technology is something every business should be doing.
In addition to investing in tech, you also need to take the time to:
- Review your current tech stack
- Try new solutions
- Learn about the advancements in solutions over the past year
Working with a business advisor will allow you to learn about new solutions for your business by leveraging the expertise of someone else. You can spend 10, 20, 30 or more hours doing all of the actions above, or you can hire a professional who can do the same task in 3 – 5 hours.
Often, it’s better to have an advisor who is familiar with your type of business advise you on the latest technology that can help you operate more efficiently.
Expert Business Advisory Services
You can become an advisor in accounting, better meet the needs of your clients and improve revenue with the help of Cash Flow Frog. Our revolutionary tool is designed to help you provide advisory services in accounting, including:
- Cash flow forecasting
- Budgeting
- Client analysis and insights
- So much more
If you want to begin offering your own business advisory service, we invite you to give Cash Flow Frog a try for free.
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