Because offering advisory is a page on your website, and billing it is a scoped engagement with hours against it. Most firms have done the first and not the second.
Wolters Kluwer's Future Ready Accountant research puts the number of firms offering advisory at 93%, up from 83% a year earlier. The AFR Top 100 data says compliance is still where most firm revenue sits.
Those two statements look contradictory and are not. They describe the same practice from two angles, and the space between them is where a great deal of unpaid professional work lives.
The three things people mean by "we do advisory"
The offer. A line on the services page, a tile in the capability deck. Costs nothing to add and commits nothing. This is where the 93% comes from.
The work. Hours actually spent helping a client decide something: whether to take the lease, how to price the new line, what the numbers mean for hiring. Most practices do a lot of this. Almost none of it was scoped.
The revenue. Hours a client agreed in advance to pay for, against a defined output, on an invoice. This is the number that shows up in the Top 100 data, and it is much smaller than the second one.
A practice can be doing a great deal of advisory work while earning almost no advisory revenue, and from the inside those two states feel the same. Everyone is busy, clients are happy, the work is interesting. It only separates when you cost it per client.
Why the work does not become revenue on its own
It is not a confidence problem and it is usually not a pricing problem. It is a sequencing problem.
Unbilled advice happens in the middle of a compliance relationship. The client rings about the BAS and the conversation drifts to whether they should put a second van on. Forty minutes later you have done genuinely valuable work on a question nobody scoped, priced or recorded.
You cannot invoice that afterwards. Not because it was not worth money, but because the client experienced it as a conversation, and an invoice for a conversation reads as a penalty for asking. So it gets written off, every time, and the write-off never appears anywhere because the hour was never recorded in the first place.
| What happened | What the practice recorded | What the client believes |
|---|---|---|
| 40 minutes on a hiring decision | Nothing | The accountant is helpful |
| A cash flow scenario built in a spreadsheet | Nothing, or "BAS prep" | Included in the fee |
| A call about whether to buy the building | Nothing | Included in the fee |
| Lodging the BAS | 1.5 hours, billed | The thing they pay for |
Four rows, one invoice. The client is not being unreasonable. They are responding accurately to what was presented to them, which is that the advice is free and the lodgement is the product.
The fix is upstream of pricing
Firms usually attack this by setting an advisory rate. That is the last step, not the first. Three things have to happen before a rate means anything.
Record the hours, including the unbillable ones. Not to bill them retrospectively, which you cannot, but because you cannot argue for a scope you cannot size. A practice that discovers it is giving away six hours a month to one client has a conversation available to it. A practice that suspects it is giving away "a fair bit" has nothing.
Give the advice a shape before you deliver it. A named piece of work, with an output the client can hold, at a price agreed first. "I will build you a twelve-month cash flow model and we will review it monthly" is sellable. "Give me a call whenever" is not, however valuable it turns out to be.
Make the work visible between the meetings. This is the part most firms skip, and it is the one that decides renewal. If the client only sees you at the quarterly, they are paying for four meetings a year. If they can see the plan, the actions and the progress in between, they are paying for a relationship. The fee survives in the second case and gets questioned in the first, which is the argument in what your client sees between meetings.
What the shift actually requires
Nothing in the above needs a new service line, a certification or a rebrand. It needs the practice to be able to answer, per client, what the engagement took and what it earned.
That is the job Empiraa GPS does for professional services firms. Hours log against the client goal they moved rather than a generic job code, so an hour on the hiring decision is attached to the goal about headcount rather than disappearing into overhead. Retainers show hours used against hours promised, with the overage flagged as given away rather than quietly absorbed. And each client has a gross profit and loss: revenue by source, direct cost, GP%.
It also gives the advice somewhere to live between meetings, which is the part that turns a conversation into an engagement the client can see they are getting value from.
One number to go and find this week
Pick your five largest clients by fee. For each, write down what you think the last three months took in hours, including the calls.
Then look at what you actually billed them.
If you cannot complete the first column with any confidence, that is the finding. The 93% is not wrong, and neither is the Top 100 data. The gap is just invisible from where most practices are standing.
Related reading: the advisory revenue your practice already has and never bills for where the hours hide, and how many clients can one advisor hold for the capacity side of the same question.
GPS Professional Services pricing starts at A$149 a month, with unlimited practice and client users on every plan.
