A client calls you after their return is done and the books are clean, and nothing needs fixing. Then they ask a question you may not have heard as often before: “What should we do next year?”
Clients still want accurate books and a clean tax return. But many want more. They want help with cash flow, pricing, and growth. They want real answers to real decisions. For accounting firms, offering accounting advisory services is an opportunity to meet these needs, differentiate themselves, and capture more business.
The firms doing well right now are not the ones who talk about advisory the most. They are the ones who are actually delivering it for every client who asks.
What Accounting Advisory Services Actually Looks Like
“Advisory” is a broad word, so here are some examples.
It is reviewing a client’s cash flow every quarter and warning them about a problem before it happens. It is checking whether a client’s sales actually cover their costs. It is building an annual plan for a client who wants to open a new location, so they know the real cost before they commit. It is giving a client guidance, backed by numbers, when they ask if a new idea is a good decision.
This work does not happen during tax preparation. It happens when the accountant becomes a financial advisor to the client. The 2026 Tax Firm Advisory Services Report from the Thomson Reuters Institute found that among firms with revenue growth, 88% said advisory revenue is growing faster than compliance revenue. Advisory services now make up 31% of total firm revenue on average. This is no longer a small part of the business. For many firms, it is becoming the main source of growth.
Senior Staff Are Doing the Wrong Work
Here is the real problem. The people most capable of doing advisory work are often your senior accountants and partners. In many cases, these same people are busy with basic production work.
If your senior staff spent this tax season doing return preparation, reconciliations, and data entry, that’s a sign of a potential problem. Every hour a senior accountant spends on routine work is an hour they are not spending with clients who want advice. Growing an advisory practice is difficult if the most experienced people have no time left to advise.
The numbers support this. Data from Inside Public Accounting’s IPA 100 study found that firms earning more than 60% of their revenue outside compliance work made $152 per work hour. Firms overall in the same study made $130 per work hour. That is a 17% difference.
Meeting Accounting Needs Requires More Capacity
Here is something many firm owners miss. Wanting to offer accounting advisory services and having the capacity to deliver them are two separate problems.
If your team is already busy with tax, accounting, and compliance work, there is limited capacity for advisory work. Something has to change, and it should not be passing on the advisory opportunity.
This capacity problem repeats every tax season. Firms that succeed at advisory work don’t find extra hours. They free up their existing team’s time by shifting routine production work elsewhere. You cannot add advisory clients if your team is already full.
A Staffing Model That Supports the Shift
There is a solution that many firm owners are failing to consider.
The repetitive, high-volume work, data entry, reconciliations, routine bookkeeping, and first-pass tax preparation, does not need to be done by your most experienced and most expensive staff. This work needs dedicated team members who act as part of your firm, trained in your systems and your software, and have the experience to handle this work consistently. This allows you to serve your clients existing needs while freeing your senior staff to focus on advisory conversations.
This is the exact model I help firms build. A virtual staffing partner like Cloudstaff lets you bring on a dedicated team member or full team to handle the more routine aspects of your practice. This is not a short-term contractor. This is someone who takes on your firm’s existing work and provides consistent high-quality work.
Once the prep and routine work has a dedicated team member handling it, your firm’s capacity is no longer tied up in day-to-day tasks. That allows you to plan, staff, and deliver advisory services instead of treating these high-value services as something you will get to later.
The Real Question Accounting Firm Leaders Should Ask Now
If you are thinking, “We will figure out advisory once things slow down,” that is a mistake. Things do not slow down. Another tax season arrives, and the same problem happens again.
The firms that will offer real accounting advisory services next year are not waiting for a slow month to appear. They are building the staffing model now, so they can begin focusing on growth. This matters even more for tax consulting firms. Clients asking for advisory help today will not wait for a firm that cannot deliver it yet.
About the Author
Jose De Soto is Vice President of Sales, Americas at Cloudstaff, where he helps accounting firms and growing businesses build high-performance virtual teams across Colombia, India, and the Philippines. A bilingual (English/Spanish) sales leader with a background in global talent strategy and accounting-focused staffing, Jose has spent years working directly with firm owners across North America to solve their capacity challenges. He holds a B.A. in International Economics from UC San Diego.
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