When I first started out in my career, I was driving around Los Angeles with a laptop bag, visiting clients one by one. I was keying transactions in from paper bank statements, printing paper checks, getting them signed, mailing them out, running payroll — the whole manual grind. I was charging by the hour and had a few dozen clients. It wasn't glamorous, but I loved it. Accounting was a career change for me. I'd been a musician before, and bookkeeping gave me flexibility, variety, and real income. I loved it.
But something was missing, and it took me a while to figure out what it was.
The Problem With Just Doing the Books
Every month, I'd do all this work to produce financials and send them out. But most of them would never look at the reports. If they did, they didn't really understand them. I was checking a box for them, and they were happy to pay me to check it, but there wasn't much value being created beyond compliance.
What I didn't understand yet was that my clients didn't have an accounting problem. They had a money problem. They wanted to know if they could afford to take a distribution at the end of the year, whether they'd make payroll, and whether there was enough cash coming in to cover next month's bills. I had all the data to answer those questions. I just wasn't doing anything useful with it.
The First Unlock: Getting Myself Out of the Work
Before I could become an advisor, I had to stop being a freelancer—and there's no secret to how that happens. It comes down to documenting processes, building repeatable workflows, hiring people and training them to do what you do, and moving clients to fixed fees so revenue is predictable. The goal is to get yourself to a point where the business generates income without you having to do all the client work.
That was the magic moment: the business was paying my team, bringing in recurring revenue, and growing. And I wasn't in the weeds anymore! I was managing client relationships and reviewing work rather than producing it. That capacity was what made everything else possible.
The Advisory Pivot: Cash Flow as the Entry Point
Once I had some breathing room, I started paying attention to what my clients were actually worried about. It was almost always cash. So we started doing short-term cash flow forecasts: rolling four-week projections that we'd update weekly. We'd set a minimum balance that the owner was comfortable with. If the forecast was going to drop below that threshold, we'd flag it early and get ahead of it. If there was extra cushion, we'd tell them, you can take a draw.
We built this into a repeatable system that my team could execute. It wasn't high-touch CFO advisory. It was structured, scalable, and genuinely useful. We were effectively acting as a controller for our clients: watching the cash, watching the money, advising on what was coming. That was a completely different value proposition than what most bookkeeping firms were offering at the time.
We didn't even have a name for it at first. It just grew out of our bill pay and payroll work. We were already watching the money going out, so we started watching the money coming in too. Clients noticed. They started recommending us to their colleagues specifically because of it.
How We Changed the Pricing
We moved from hourly to fixed fees and tiered our pricing based on meeting cadence. Weekly clients paid one rate, monthly another, quarterly another. It sounds simple, but it changed the business dynamic.
Pricing by meeting frequency naturally managed our capacity. If we knew how often we were talking to each client, we knew how many clients we could serve. It also meant we were in front of clients regularly, which gave us constant opportunities to surface more value, answer their questions in real time, and make them feel like we were part of their team rather than a service provider operating somewhere in the background. That relationship visibility made the value tangible in a way that a monthly financial report never could.
What I'd Do Differently Today: The Tech Stack
One of my biggest headaches back then was banking. Getting my team access to client bank accounts without creating security gaps was a real problem. Multi-factor authentication, shared login workarounds, chasing down statements… There was a ton of friction that just doesn’t need to exist today.
If I were building the firm today, I’d standardize on a modern banking platform like Relay1 as the operating account for clients. The source of almost all a small business's financial data flows through its bank. The bank data is the money in and the money out. If you have a system that gives your whole team clean access to that data, connects it directly to the accounting system, and handles receipt capture in the same place, you’ve eliminated a huge amount of the back-and-forth that used to eat up our time. That makes the cash flow work I described above significantly easier to scale.
For clients who are hesitant to move away from their local or community bank, I’d push back this way: You don’t want all your eggs in one basket. We’ve seen what happens when a bank fails, flags an account for automated risk review, and shuts off access overnight. Use Relay as the operating account where cash flows in and out. Keep the community bank for savings, lending relationships, whatever you need to maintain. The two complement each other.
Beyond banking, the core stack for an advisory-focused practice is pretty simple: an accounting system (QuickBooks or Xero are the gold standards, though newer options like Puzzle and Digits are worth watching), a modern payroll platform (I like OnPay or Gusto for most small businesses), and Relay as your banking platform. Relay is the one I’d recommend as the default. It’s purpose-built for small businesses, gives your whole team the visibility and access they need, and sits at the center of the cash flow work I described above. That’s your foundation. You can layer on a reporting tool like Fathom if you want to deliver KPI dashboards or pull in non-financial operational data. But the core three—accounting, payroll, Relay—get you most of the way there.
1Relay is a financial technology company and is not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank, Member FDIC. FDIC deposit insurance covers the failure of an insured bank. Certain conditions must be satisfied for pass-through deposit insurance coverage to apply.
Where to Start If You're Making This Shift
If you're doing bookkeeping today and want to move toward advisory, start with the 4-week rolling cash flow forecast. It's the most immediately useful thing you can do for a small business client, it's learnable, and it's something you can build into a workflow your team can run. You review it, you meet with the client, you talk through it. That's it.
From there, you can expand. Extend the forecast window. Start doing light FP&A work—forecasting income statements, balance sheets. Add operational data if the client is willing to share it: sales activity, customer metrics, whatever is relevant to their business. AI makes this kind of analysis significantly more accessible than it used to be. If you have the financial data, the payroll data, and some operational context, you can generate insights that genuinely help a business owner make decisions. That’s when you're functioning as a CFO, not just a bookkeeper.
The focus for small firms should be on the scalable advisory services. The stuff you can templatize, build into a workflow, and train your team to execute. High-touch, experience-intensive advisory is hard to scale when you're the only senior person. But structured, repeatable services that you review and present? That scales.
The Capacity Problem (And How to Solve It)
The hardest part of making this transition isn't the skills or the tools, it's finding the time. Most accountants and bookkeepers are running at 80–90% utilization, which leaves maybe half a day a week to think about how to grow or change the business. That's not enough.
The first step is creating capacity, and the fastest way to do that is to identify the clients you're undercharging and raise their prices. Almost every firm has them. When you do it, don't just send a price increase notice; send a letter that explains what you've added. What have you been doing for them that they might not be fully aware of? New services, more frequent communication, proactive advice? Make the value visible.
Some clients will leave. That's okay. In fact, it's the point. The ones who leave are the price-sensitive ones, and the capacity they free up is what lets you build something better. In my experience, you almost never lose revenue when you raise prices thoughtfully. You get the same revenue or more, for less work, with more time to invest in the next stage of the business.
The goal is to eventually be spending about half your time on client work and half on building systems, new services, hiring, and prospecting. That balance is what makes running an accounting firm one of the best businesses out there. And the shift from transactional bookkeeper to trusted adviser is what gets you there.
If you're ready to start building your firm's tech stack around a banking platform that actually supports advisory work, Relay1 is where I'd begin. The cash visibility, the team access, the automated money movement—it's the foundation that makes everything else easier to build on.
1Relay is a financial technology company and is not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank, Member FDIC. FDIC deposit insurance covers the failure of an insured bank. Certain conditions must be satisfied for pass-through deposit insurance coverage to apply.
