Accounting firms that evolve beyond compliance and embrace scalable advisory services are better positioned to meet clients’ changing needs and drive sustainable growth.
The accounting profession has always evolved. However, the pace of change now is enabled by practical artificial intelligence (AI). While labor shortages, costs, scalability, and capacity were addressed by outsourcing, client relationships are too valuable and too complex to hand over to outsourced talent.
Clients seek genuine business advice tailored to their specific needs. These bespoke needs can be addressed by understanding the client’s personal and business plans and providing the service or referring them to the right expert with the necessary skills to satisfy the need.
Jump to ↓
What do clients want?
Clients want to run their business, which is their passion, without leaving money on the table. Your firm can deliver specific advice for their evolving needs. The needs of each client vary widely, and you need a methodology to capture and understand these needs.
Clients’ needs progress over time, and your advisory solutions should also evolve accordingly. Your clients might have an interest in maximizing profit, minimizing risk, or not working so hard in their own operation.
Meeting specific client needs could involve goals beyond profitability. While today’s focus might be on operational excellence and minimizing tax exposure, new priorities could be children’s education, business succession, charitable giving, and preserving long-term wealth.
But do you have the skills to deliver this today? Let’s be honest—most partners are still billing by the hour because it’s comfortable, even though they know it’s limiting their firm’s growth potential.
The hardest conversation isn’t about technology; it’s about changing how we’ve always done business. You might have great advisory skills, some capability, or none, but if you decide to pursue this, you will do better for your firm and your clients with a “coach in your corner.”
An AI-powered platform can help you, instead of models constrained by spreadsheets, word processing, or a single individual’s knowledge. After all, the client is served by the firm and your team of accounting professionals. While we respect the thoroughness, creativity, and inventiveness of individual accounting professionals, it is hard to leverage the skills of relatively few people across your firm for all the clients.
Transferring the specialized advisory knowledge is challenging. Finally, there may be many other opportunities that are not being presented to the client. For example, financial information may need to be re-keyed due to changes in financial position that affect the business strategy.
If your systems do not do this automatically and you do not have a proactive offering that improves business profitability, your firm and your client will miss this opportunity. The best advisory models are never static. Your clients are probably not static either.
What advisory services and why AI?
While there is much talk about advisory services, what are they? Business and personal planning are primary services. Additional advisory services you want to perform in your firm are your secondary services. These are dependent on your team’s expertise and interests, and the needs of your client base.
For example, almost all businesses have human resource needs. If you have the expertise or can build it, that will be a high-value, recurring advisory service. A standard historic advisory service was tax planning, which your firm may have provided on a reactionary consulting basis, or without charging appropriately as part of your tax compliance service.
On the other hand, services you do not want to provide are tertiary services. Think of tertiary services like a concierge in a hotel; you are going to refer clients to a reputable provider of that service. Some firms will take referral fees for tertiary services, and others do not.
Advisory services are highly valued and desired from the clients’ perspective. Additionally, advisory services provide opportunities for new accounting professionals to become involved with clients directly. New professionals really want to be proactively involved with clients. Advisory adds additional profit opportunities for the client and the firm beyond traditional compliance.
Further, compliance and client accounting services are likely to be automated more in the future with AI and are at risk of becoming commoditized. The firms that wait another year to embrace AI-powered advisory will find themselves competing on price for commoditized services while their forward-thinking competitors build premium advisory relationships. Waiting by doing SALY (Same as Last Year) will produce similar results with comparable work.
Advisory services also leverage your accounting expertise and your network of experts to deliver unique services to the client and the firm. You can provide leverage for your tax and Client Accounting Services (CAS) because these services will identify and quantify opportunities. Advisory drives opportunities for niche services such as business structure, business valuation, or merger/acquisition services.
How AI can help with tax planning
And why AI? When properly controlled, AI can leverage general knowledge and specific opportunities for the client. Furthermore, AI assistants will quickly and comprehensively identify, gather, and organize client opportunities in ways that were previously unaffordable or impossible. Think of an AI assistant as a tireless, attentive professional that will watch what you identify as crucial to your clients and to you.
On private platforms, client confidentiality is protected, unlike many Large Language Model (LLM/Generative AI) products. We can use AI to generate known and effective business cases that are structured to support legal and creative approaches to problem-solving. Accuracy can be controlled on private platforms and with agentic AI, minimizing the hallucinations common in LLM products.
Further, the time to construct and analyze solutions is reduced. Accounting professionals can utilize their skills to identify and prioritize solutions for clients, rather than selecting from a few approaches that have been reformatted from another client.
AI inside a platform has already been configured to optimize your professional work. You can personalize it further to create your own firm’s “special sauce” and insights.
How can we use AI to develop, manage, deliver, and scale advisory services?
We need a consistent way to surface and manage these engagements for business development purposes. For scalability and profitability, we must have the right platform with the right technology. Enter Ready to Advise.
Why should you look at this solution? Ready to Advise is an AI-powered tax planning advisory solution designed to streamline your workflow and bring more value to your client relationships. Thomson Reuters has a long history of incorporating AI into its products, first introducing AI in Westlaw in the 1990s.
The company established a research and development group in 1992, focused on AI and machine learning. Thomson Reuters established an Innovation Hub in Toronto to leverage Canada’s AI talent pool and robust intellectual property (IP) protections. Now, with the broad release of CoCounsel AI-powered technology, you can anticipate enhanced professional capabilities.
Guided by the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles, ethical AI development is funded by $100M+ of annual investment. Acquisitions of products with key AI IP are advancing Thomson Reuters AI initiatives rapidly, as illustrated by Ready to Advise.
In the accounting profession, as noted above, the core consulting service for many firms was tax planning. However, for many firms, this was little more than providing estimates of quarterly payments due, attempting to avoid penalties. With today’s regulations, many tax strategies can save your client significant money.
Ready to Advise can quickly and proactively identify the most impactful tax planning strategies. Securely and safely upload your client’s tax return and supporting data, and the AI-powered platform does the rest.
We do not recommend uploading confidential client data into most LLM/Generative AI platforms for security and compliance reasons. Your firm’s risk is too great! But in a secure environment that is already trusted with sensitive client data? You minimize risk and maximize upside.
Advantages of AI-powered advisory services
What are the advantages for your firm? Your team members will save time, particularly among experienced partners and managers. Less experienced staff can confidently and quickly understand a client’s tax situation, surface relevant strategies, and prepare professional, client-ready reports that illustrate the impact of your recommendations, along with the benefits of using your firm’s expertise.
The platform will also discover additional advisory services to suggest to clients for even more revenue. You can build a scalable, reliable advisory tax planning service backed up by the expertise and trusted content of Thomson Reuters Checkpoint. In effect, Ready to Advise becomes the engine driving your advisory practice, providing valuable leverage for your professionals.
Perhaps more important than a single advisory service is a framework that enables your firm to provide advisory services at scale. Too many firms and practitioners are giving away advice for free.
If you use a methodology like Thomson Reuters Practice Forward to expand your business model into offering advisory services to your clients, you will have tried and tested tools to help define your service offerings, standardize your deliverables, and have a sales process that will expand your compliance offerings into an advisory relationship.
With Thomson Reuters Ready to Advise, you will have a powerful tool that will help you deliver on these new services you’re offering, to scale your business and profitability.
Realistically, you will get the best results if you use both Thomson Reuters Ready to Advise and Practice Forward, you will have a perfect pairing that go hand-in hand. Most firms have less than 10% of their revenue from advisory services.
Done well, client satisfaction and potential revenue may dwarf your compliance revenue. Additionally, you and your team may improve your work-life balance, earning more money with fewer clients who are the right fit, and rediscovering the value of client relationships over transactional business.
Picture having substantive strategic conversations on important client-centric topics instead of rushing through compliance checklists. Imagine leaving the office at the close of business, confident that your AI assistant has identified every tax-saving opportunity for your clients while you were in meetings.
Why advisory? It can help you rediscover your passion
Many accounting professionals got into the profession with a desire to help clients succeed while enjoying a high-profile status in the community and a reasonable lifestyle. Unfortunately, the deadline work of tax, assurance, and Client Accounting Services took away much of that joy.
To help you rediscover your accounting passion, Ready to Advise and Practice Forward eliminate the difficulty and drudgery of building an end-to-end system to deliver the services.
With hundreds of templates and tools, connections to other professionals providing similar services, plus ongoing support and education, you can deliver bespoke consulting at scale. With advisory services, you and your firm can finally deliver on the accounting profession’s promise of helping clients be compliant, successful, and profitable.
Are you ready to move beyond giving away advice for free? Do you want to advise clients with strategic and money-saving advice proactively? Try Practice Forward’s sample tools and see how you can systematically convert your expertise into profitable, scalable advisory services.
