From Number Crunching to Number Coaching: Dissecting the Accounting Advisory Trend

In what universe does an accounting firm owner connect three of his clients so they can produce a reality TV show? In Dave Kersting’s world of concierge consulting services, apparently!

Kersting, who owns Denver-based Capovario, probably didn’t think he was doing anything special during his separate conversations with three individual clients. One had an idea for a reality TV show. Another was a ghostwriter with contacts in the entertainment industry. The third was a California production manager who worked on movies and TV shows.

But sometime after the third conversation, something clicked, and Kersting saw an opportunity to introduce the trio to each other.

The result was Our 3 Dads, a reality TV show that has been viewed nearly one billion times across platforms. Would this dream have come to pass if Kersting were only interested in what sits inside each client’s books? Not likely.

Kersting’s clients don’t just come to him to reconcile accounts or make sense of their financial statements. They bring him problems, ideas, and questions that often have nothing to do with accounting—and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s not just bookkeeping. It’s not just tax. It’s concierge consulting,” Kersting says. “It’s getting into the pain point of the client and knowing how to do what we need to do.”

Dave Kersting

The approach is built on a simple idea: the better you know your clients, the more valuable you are to them.

“Just Bookkeeping” Doesn’t Cut It Anymore

For the vast majority of the 13 firm owners spotlighted in the Proudly Small issue of Two Cents Magazine, the basic foundations of compliance work—bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation—no longer capture the full scope of client engagements. 

For Kersting, the question isn’t simply, “What do the books say?” It’s also, “What is the client trying to accomplish, and how can we help them get there?”

Angela Jenkins, who owns Mindfull Money Matters in Philadelphia, describes her role similarly, but using slightly different terminology.

I look at myself as a storyteller for your business, because the financials tell a story,” Jenkins explains, emphasizing that numbers are never the end of the conversation.

Angela Jenkins

Lynn James-Young from Bring It Bookkeeping takes that idea even further. She sees herself as a problem-solver and mentor, beginning each engagement with a question that has little to do with bookkeeping.

“The first thing I ask my clients when I meet them is, ‘What’s your exit strategy?’” James-Young says.

It’s an unconventional question for someone whose job title might simply read, “bookkeeper.” But it makes sense when you consider what a business owner actually needs from the person who handles their books.

In reality, the bookkeeper is one of the few people in the business with enough financial context to notice a problem, challenge an assumption, or help guide the owner toward where they want the business to go next.

As a former business owner in the niche her firm—Tiny Paws Bookkeeping—now specializes in, Anne-Marie Kaden is particularly well-poised to take on a more advisory-type position.

I think [our niche expertise] allows us to bleed into that advisory-type service more than just traditional bookkeepers,” Kaden says.

Anne Marie Kaden

Katie Helle’s description of her firm’s value proposition at Scaled Accounting Solutions is similarly distinct from pure compliance

We’re obviously providing the compliance side of things, but there is way more value than just the filing of the tax return,” says Helle, who owns Arizona-based Scaled Accounting Solutions.

Katie Helle

To be clear, these firm owners aren’t suggesting that compliance work has become obsolete. The books still have to be right, the returns still have to be filed, and the financials still have to tell the truth. But in this day and age, that’s where the work starts—not where it ends.

The Translator

For a business owner, a clean set of financial records and a basic understanding of what those numbers mean are two different things. The first satisfies a regulatory requirement. The second presents an opportunity to grow. Without the latter, the client is left to make sense of the numbers themselves—regardless of their level of financial fluency.

Kaden sees this regularly. Her clients are mostly from non-business, non-financial backgrounds. When they open a report, many of them see a page full of numbers without any idea what those numbers are saying.

Our clients don’t have a business background,” she says. “They don’t understand financial reports. They really need somebody to bring the technical jargon down to plain English and be able to explain it in a way [that makes sense].”

Anne Marie Kaden

But knowing what a report says and knowing how to explain it to someone else are two distinct skills. That’s why, when hiring for any role on her team, Kaden strongly focuses on skills like communication and emotional intelligence.

“I need somebody who can recognize when eyes are about to glaze over, and they’ve gone too far down the technical side,” Kaden says.

The goal isn’t to make clients into accountants themselves, but to help them understand enough that the numbers are actually useful to them.

That’s exactly where Jenkins’ “storytelling” approach becomes useful. 

The financials tell the story—whether you’re doing great or not,” Jenkins says. “They tell the story of what’s happening and where you can go, and it’s simply interpreting the numbers in a way that makes sense to other people.”

Angela Jenkins

In many ways, the accounting professional acts as a translator: someone who interprets the data using language the client can understand. A rising expense might be a problem, or it might be the cost of a deliberate investment. A cash drop might signal trouble, or it might reflect a one-time decision the owner made months earlier.

The numbers alone don’t capture the full context of these stories, which is why Kaden believes that gaining a comprehensive understanding of a client’s financial position requires looking beyond the line items in a spreadsheet.

The other half of financial reports is not just what we can see on paper, but what the client is telling you about,” Kaden says. “Or what they are not telling you when they talk about their business.”

Anne Marie Kaden

The Accounting Coach

Once a client understands what their numbers are telling them, the next natural challenge is knowing what to do about it. At this point, the client needs the clarity to make the best possible decisions. Sometimes, providing that clarity is the most valuable work a small firm can do. And it’s much harder for a firm to confidently offer this type of clarity when they don’t interact with each client on a regular basis.

To foster a coaching relationship with clients, James-Young makes a point of meeting with them one-on-one every quarter. In those meetings, she goes over the numbers and tries to help them understand key financial context long before the client needs to make a specific decision.

During these conversations, James-Young leads with the client’s endgame—because if you know where someone wants to go, you have a better sense of how to help them get there.

As a business owner, you need to know what your goals are,” James-Young says. “Do you want to grow? Do you want to sell your business? That helps to set the pace for where we need to go.”

Lynn James-Young

A business owner who eventually wants to sell, for example, may need to think differently about growth, profitability, documentation, or business structure than someone who intends to pass it on to a child or run it indefinitely.

Helle also makes a point of scheduling regular check-ins with clients.

I don’t prefer to work with people on an annual basis for like, say, tax filing compliance,” Helle explains. “I like that year-round relationship where we are connecting multiple times a year doing tax planning, so that now during filing season, we basically know where they’re going to fall out.”

Katie Helle

A firm that sees a client once a year is mostly looking backward. But a firm that stays connected with each client throughout the year has more opportunities to notice what’s changing—while there’s still time to do something about it.

Christine Salvatore, who founded California-based In Line Management, understands that while her job isn’t to make such business decisions for her clients, she is responsible for giving them enough clarity to make a confident decision themselves.

I’ve always been able to show up for my clients in a clear-minded way to explain things to them,” Salvatore says. “I love being able to give the clarity of the data that they need to make informed decisions. I’m impacting lives by fixing my little puzzle in the background.”

Christine Salvatore

In Kaden’s firm, niche experience plays a crucial role in that coaching relationship. Her team’s professional background and the number of clients they work with give the firm a unique edge in helping clients through difficult situations.

“Whatever is coming across their plate is something I’ve seen before, either in my own business or just by the fact that we’re looking at a hundred different companies across the US,” Kaden says. “We’ve seen it happen and play out in different ways.”

A business owner may be encountering a particular problem for the first time, while the firm has seen some version of it dozens of time. Guided by the knowledge of what happened in other businesses, which decisions created problems later, and which questions are worth asking before an issue snowballs, Kaden and her team are able to offer extremely valuable, experience-backed advice. And that’s something their clients can’t get anywhere else.

The Teacher

Even though Tamra Helton is primarily a bookkeeper, she considers part of her job at Tied Out Books giving business owners the knowledge and confidence they need to advocate for themselves when she is not in the room.

I’m giving you tax knowledge to go to your tax preparer and ask them these things,” Helton explains. “Because a lot of tax preparers just do their due diligence. They take what you give them, they prepare the return, boom.”

Tamra Helton

James-Young describes herself as a financial mentor to her clients. But she readily acknowledges that most of them know way more about their own professions than she does.

“I have doctors [as clients],” she says. “I have people that are way smarter than me, but not when it comes to financials.”

The doctor knows medicine. But the accounting firm knows numbers. Bridging the gap between these two worlds is core to the advisory model.

For Kaden, part of the reason she chose the pet care niche in the first place was her desire to create a safe and comfortable place for clients to have hard financial conversations. It’s something she struggled to find back when she was running a pet care business of her own.

[Traditional bookkeepers] didn’t understand that our job is a real job, that it’s not just a hobby,” Kaden says. “That was one of the big considerations when I was looking for what to do next. It made being in that space, being a resource for other companies, really appeal to me.”

Anne Marie Kaden

Being a trusted resource means more than having the “right” answer when a client asks for it. It means empathizing with the client and leaving them with more knowledge and confidence than they had before.

In a more traditional accounting model, firms take the numbers, work on them behind the scenes, and return a finished product. The teacher, on the other hand, brings the client into the process—not to turn them into an accountant, but to give them enough understanding to meaningfully participate in conversations about their financial future.

The Connector

Connecting clients to other people, resources, and communities may be the least obvious form of advisory work. But for a business owner constantly trying to solve one problem or another, knowing who to call can be just as valuable as knowing what the numbers mean.

Kersting’s reality TV story is an extreme example of what happens when an accounting firm becomes closely attuned to its clients’ businesses and goals. But the underlying principle is widely applicable.

For example, Capovario also helps clients with insurance, benefits, and other HR-related needs—many of which Kersting chooses not to charge for.

Those are free services that we offer at my firm,” he shares. “Because why would I bill for connecting a dot? To me, it’s the value. It’s providing that extra, that’s just the icing on the cake.”

Dave Kersting

Kersting is not suggesting that every single business problem belongs to the accounting firm that offers advisory services. He’s simply saying that when he knows someone who can help with a particular issue, making that connection or introduction is part of the firm’s value  to the client.

Ultimately, he wants his clients to think of his firm anytime they have a question, idea, or challenge. His response, many times, is, “You know what? I know I can solve that problem.”

Sometimes “solve” means fixing the problem himself. Other times, it means knowing who can—a reminder that a firm’s usefulness doesn’t have to end with the bounds of its internal expertise.

That said, team knowledge becomes especially powerful when a firm has deep experience in a particular industry. That is partly what Kaden has built into her firm. She intentionally hires people who have worked in the pet care niche, and that’s exactly what gives the Tiny Paws team a perspective that extends well beyond the books.

They understand the industry from the inside. They know its language, and they’ve seen enough to recognize the kinds of problems their clients are likely to encounter. That kind of knowledge expands what small bookkeeping and accounting firms can offer, enabling them to identify problems earlier, point a client to helpful resources faster, or introduce them to someone who can help them better.

Why Accounting “Advisory” Isn’t Necessarily the Right Word

Generally speaking, the accounting industry has embraced the word “advisory” as shorthand for the evolution of accounting services beyond compliance. But that term presents an interesting conundrum: many of the firm owners doing the work most commonly associated with “advisory” don’t actually call it that.

Kersting is one of them. His firm helps clients interpret their financials, think through problems, connect with specialists, and stay close enough to their businesses to understand what is happening and when to suggest an idea (or make an introduction).

By most industry definitions, that fits neatly under the advisory umbrella. But as noted above, Kersting prefers to call it “concierge consulting.”

A lot of people wonder why I use ‘concierge consulting’ instead of ‘advisory services,’” Kersting says. “To me, ‘advisory services’ sounds like I’m telling you how to run your company. I can’t advise you on how to run your own company, but what I can do is work together with you in a consulting way, where I’m bringing in other people that are experts in that particular topic.”

Dave Kersting

He’s not rejecting the work associated with advisory. It’s just that his role, as he sees it, is less about telling clients what to do and more about working with them to figure things out.

For Jenkins, the preferred descriptor is “storyteller.” Her job is to interpret the client’s story in a way that makes sense and offers clients clear direction to act on it.

That said, some firm owners—Helle, for example—are perfectly comfortable with the word “advisory.” So, this is less an argument against the word itself, and more an argument against the assumption that one word can adequately describe a relationship that looks different from firm to firm.

Consulting feels more collaborative. Storytelling centres on interpretation. Mentoring focuses on teaching. Problem-solving leans towards action. And connecting emphasizes the network around the firm.

None of these descriptions is necessarily more correct than the others. In fact, the variety in terminology says a lot about the evolution of the work. It shows how fast the services have evolved beyond the industry’s vocabulary for describing them.

Whatever vocabulary you use, what matters is that the client is receiving more than mere compliance—because that is what will truly differentiate your firm from all the rest.

Words Small Firm Accounting Owners Use to Describe This Work

The Prospect Education Gap

When a prospect asks, “What exactly am I paying for?”, it may have less to do with the price than the way the accounting industry as a whole has historically positioned its value.

For years, the language was simple: bookkeeping, tax preparation, payroll. While those services are still offered, they don’t describe everything a modern firm does for its clients. So when a prospect sees a quote higher than what they expected to pay for “bookkeeping,” it might set off an alarm bell in their head.

That’s because the prospect is likely evaluating the price against the services they think they’re buying. They don’t realize that the relationship may include much more (i.e., helping them understand their numbers, planning for what’s ahead, making decisions, solving problems, and being connected to people who can help them in other ways).

The good news is that many firms are already doing this type of work. And in that case, they probably don’t need to do more to take advantage of this shift toward an emphasis on advisory—they just need better language to communicate the value they’re already providing.

When a firm tells a prospect, “We do your bookkeeping and tax returns,” the prospect has a straightforward basis for comparison. They can compare prices with another firm offering the same bookkeeping and tax return services.

But if the firm can use language that describes the value of the relationship, the conversation changes, and the prospect no longer compares service menus. It all comes down to positioning.

Who Are You Beyond the Numbers?

For years, the accounting industry has talked about expansion beyond compliance work as though it were something over the horizon. But based on what we heard from the small-firm owners featured in Two Cents, that shift is already here.

It could be a bookkeeper sitting down with a client to ask about their exit strategy, an accountant translating a financial statement into a story a business owner can actually understand, or a firm teaching a client enough about taxes to ask better questions (and get better deductions).

These firm owners might not label themselves as “advisors.” Instead, they call themselves storytellers, translators, mentors, problem-solvers, and concierge consultants. Regardless of title, though, the underlying approach is consistent: the work doesn’t end when the numbers are crunched. Actually, that’s where it begins.

The numbers give the firm a way into the conversation. What comes next is helping the owner understand what the math means, decide what action to take next, and find the people or resources to help make it happen. In that sense, the advisory shift isn’t necessarily about adding a new service to the menu. It’s about recognizing and defining the value that’s already hiding in the relationship.

Kersting’s words perfectly capture this pivot, emphasizing this profession’s innate propensity for helping others realize their full potential: “This is who we ARE!”

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