Why good work goes unseen
Client advisory services, or CAS, is the part of an accounting practice beyond compliance: bookkeeping and close done to a standard, plus reporting, planning and advice, on a recurring fee rather than by the hour.
The benchmark numbers are good. CPA.com and the AICPA's CAS Benchmark Survey, published in December 2024 from 206 practices reporting calendar 2023 results, found median CAS growth of 17 percent, median net client fees of $156,250 per professional, and only 10 percent of practices billing hourly. Firms that invest in technology serve around 100 clients against 67 for those that do not.
What the survey does not measure is whether the owner notices. We see a pattern in firms with multi-entity clients. The firm closes five QuickBooks Online files to a high standard, reconciles the intercompany, sends a package by the 20th, and the owner does not open it, because the package answers questions the owner stopped asking in the third week of the month. The owner looks at the bank app instead. There are two sets of books in that relationship: the firm's, which are right, and the owner's, which are a bank balance and a feeling, and only the second is readable on a phone at 7 a.m.
The TD Bank survey by Wakefield Research in March 2025, of 250 small business owners, found that 66 percent are the sole person responsible for their company's finances and only 36 percent assess them monthly. A firm's monthly package lands on people who, by their own account, look at the numbers less often than that.
What a multi-entity client actually asks
Five QuickBooks Online files, one owner. She runs three restaurants, a commissary kitchen and a real estate LLC that owns two of the buildings. Her questions to the firm over a year are almost never about the package. They are which restaurant made money last month, what total cash is across all five accounts right now, why the consolidated revenue is bigger than the three restaurants added together, and what changed since last week. The last one matters most, and no monthly package can answer it.
QuickBooks Online does not add the files together. Each company is its own subscription, and even Spreadsheet Sync on Advanced only stacks accounts with identical names and does no eliminations, as set out in whether QuickBooks Online can consolidate multiple companies. So the firm builds a workbook. It takes a senior person half a day a month and is right for one day.
Intercompany elimination is the step of canceling transactions between companies under common ownership, such as rent paid by a restaurant to the property LLC, so the combined figures do not count the same dollar twice. Firms do this well and clients never see it; the only visible version is the error when it is skipped.
Packaging the close with a daily instrument
The packaging that works is the monthly close the firm already does, plus a daily view of the same numbers that the owner opens in the morning, plus a short monthly call, priced per entity. The daily view is the existing deliverable made visible: the close the firm did, updated each day with what has posted since.
A firm bills $2,850 a month to keep five entities closed for the restaurant owner above, $570 per file. It proposes an advisory tier at $4,750 a month: the same close, a consolidated monthly package with the rent and management fee eliminated, a daily view of cash, margin and receivables by entity under the firm's name, and a 30-minute call on the first Tuesday. The firm's added cost is a reporting layer at about $900 a month for the five files and roughly three senior hours a month, say $360 loaded. The added fee is $1,900 a month. The added cost is about $1,260, and the margin on the addition around $640. The relationship moves from a vendor the owner tolerates to the person she calls before deciding on the fourth restaurant.
| Close only | Close plus daily view | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee | $2,850 | $4,750 |
| Reporting layer | $0 | about $900 |
| Senior time on the addition | none | about 3 hours ($360) |
| Added margin | about $640 a month | |
| What the owner opens | a PDF, sometimes | a morning email, most days |
Set that against what the owner would pay elsewhere. Fractional CFO pricing guides put a retainer at $3,000 to $5,000 a month for companies under $5 million in revenue (Eightx, June 2026) and $3,000 to $12,000 across the market (Pilot, August 2025). An owner at that size is not comparing your $1,900 to zero but to a fractional CFO she has been thinking about hiring, and how those options look from her side is in AI CFO, fractional CFO or bookkeeper.
What to keep in the firm's name
The close, the judgment and the call stay with the firm. The client pays for those. A tool cannot do them. The daily view should carry the firm's name, because the moment it arrives from a software company the owner starts to think the software is doing the work.
Navigator's partner program is set up for this. The firm connects the client's QuickBooks Online files read-only, the morning brief and the app go out under the firm's name, every figure opens to the transaction it came from, and the firm shares in the revenue. Additional entities are half price, which matters for the five-file client. The terms are on the partners page.
The common advice in CAS playbooks is to start advisory with your simplest single-entity clients and expand from there. We would start with the messiest multi-entity client instead. That owner cannot get the answer anywhere else, the fee is easiest to justify, and the work you already do for them is the most under-recognized in your book.
Onboarding a five-entity client in a week
Onboarding is where most CAS additions die, because the firm assumes it must first standardize five charts of accounts. That is the step nobody finishes. QuickBooks Community threads going back to 2023 are full of firms told to standardize before they can combine, still doing it in Excel two years later. A reporting layer that reads the files as they are removes the step; the mapping to a common set of accounts is done once, in an afternoon.
Day one is the read-only connection for each file and a list of the intercompany relationships: who rents from whom, who charges a management fee, which entity pays shared payroll. Day two is the account mapping and choosing the handful of numbers each entity should report, which for restaurants means prime cost and cash by location and for the property LLC means rent collected against debt service. Day three is checking that the consolidated balance sheet ties to the sum of the five, less intercompany, and finding the $6,300 due-to that one file has and the other does not. Day four is the partner review. Day five the owner gets the first morning email with the firm's name on it. What that owner is trying to do from their side is in managing the finances of multiple businesses.
What this cannot do is fix a bad close. If the books are two months behind, the daily view shows two-month-old numbers next to today's bank balance, and the owner will notice within a week. The instrument exposes the close, which is the point and also the risk.
Objections you will hear inside the firm
The first is that clients do not want daily numbers. Some do not, and a 36 percent monthly review rate says most owners read nothing now. What they want is to know what changed, and a morning email with three lines is the format that gets read. The second is that a daily tool makes the firm look replaceable. Our experience is the opposite: the tool makes the close visible for the first time, and the close is the firm's. The third is that the AI will be wrong and the firm will wear it. That is a fair worry, and the answer is citation. Any figure the owner sees should open to the QuickBooks entry it came from, so the question becomes whether that transaction is right, which the firm can answer.
Pricing is the last objection, usually phrased as "we cannot charge for a tool". Do not. Charge for the close, the elimination and the call, per entity, and treat the daily view as how the client receives them. Only 10 percent of CAS practices bill hourly, and a per-entity fee is the simplest fixed price for an owner who already thinks in entities.
Questions owners ask
What are client advisory services?
Client advisory services (CAS) are the recurring, fixed-fee services an accounting firm provides beyond tax and compliance: bookkeeping and monthly close to a standard, management reporting, cash forecasting, planning and advice. The AICPA and CPA.com benchmark survey of 206 practices found CAS revenue growing at a median of 17 percent a year, with niche practices earning 38 percent more.
How do accounting firms price CAS?
Mostly on fixed monthly fees; only 10 percent of practices in the CPA.com and AICPA benchmark survey bill hourly. Common models are a tiered package by service level or a per-entity fee, which suits owners with several companies. Fractional CFO retainers of $3,000 to $5,000 a month for companies under $5 million in revenue (Eightx, June 2026) set the ceiling the client compares against.
How do I add advisory services to a bookkeeping firm?
Start with clients whose close you already control and who own more than one entity, since they have the most unanswered questions. Package the close with a consolidated monthly report, a short monthly call and a daily view of cash and margin by entity, priced per entity. Keep the judgment and the call in the firm's name, and let a reporting layer do the daily refresh.
What software do firms use for client reporting?
Firms commonly use Fathom ($50 to $680 a month, consolidation up to 300 entities), LiveFlow, Reach Reporting (from $149 a month), Jirav (from $10,000 a year) or Intuit's Spreadsheet Sync ($235 a month with QuickBooks Advanced). Read-only tools that connect to each QuickBooks Online file, cancel intercompany and send a daily brief under the firm's name are a newer option for multi-entity clients.
Related
The reason your client's files will not add themselves up is in can QuickBooks Online consolidate multiple companies. The owner's side of the same problem is in how to manage the finances of several businesses without a spreadsheet. And the comparison your client is quietly running against you is in AI CFO, fractional CFO or bookkeeper: what each costs and does.
If you have a client with three or more QuickBooks files and a package they do not open, the partner program is described on navigatorhq.ai/partners.
Published . Last updated . Reviewed by a CFO on the Navigator team.