A Comprehensive Guide on Accounting Consultant

What is Accounting Consulting?

As an accounting practice based in the United Kingdom, your clients must have high expectations of you and your accountants. The reason is simple: the regulatory demands of the UK have become strict, necessitating your clients to demand more services from you, such as Accounting Consulting Services.

Traditional accountants would work on compiling financial statements, handling compliance work, preparing tax returns, and working on backend accounting services. Nevertheless, your clients are now demanding services from you in the capacity of an accounting consultant so that they can get all-around accounting advice.

An accounting consultant offers a wide range of services to help your clients improve their financial position and streamline their accounting processes. To understand in detail, accounting consulting does the following jobs:

• Helping your business clients maintain accurate accounting practices
• Offering your expertise in understanding the financial numbers and making your clients understand its impact on their business
• Examining your client’s profitable
• Developing and implementing accounting processes for your clients

What Are the Benefits of Accounting Consultants?

By availing yourself of the services of an accounting consultant, you will be able to guide your clients in improving their services and accounting processes. Apart from that, there are multiple benefits of availing the services of an accounting consultant, which are as follows.

Specialised Knowledge

One of the major benefits of availing accounting consulting services is getting access to specialised knowledge. An accounting consultant is well-versed with HMRC’s latest updates in financial regulations, industry standards, and market trends. Through expert advice, you ensure that your clients comply with all the latest regulations and rules.

Optimum Utilisation of Time and Resources

Through accounting consulting services, you can delegate complex financial tasks. Thus, you can concentrate on core accounting activities and expand and improve your services, which can lead to increased productivity and time savings.

Risk Mitigation

Running an accounting practice is full of risk because you deal with transaction in high volumes and numbers. Chances are you will miss out on something that will cost you dearly. But an accounting consultant has the expertise to identify financial risks and recommend strategies, thus avoiding mistakes and ensuring your clients financial stability.

Scalability and Flexibility

As your client’s business expands, so will their accounting requirements and complexities. You should be ready to meet such requirements from your clients by enlisting the help of an accounting consultant. They will provide you with services and backup during a high workload, thus giving you the capability to scale up and adjust your services accordingly.

What’s the Difference Between Accounting and Consulting?

In the past, accountancy meant collecting legacy financial data and working on it, but consultancy is one step ahead. When we talk about the difference between accounting and consultancy, you must know that in consultancy, not just the calculations are done; complete analysis is also done, along with providing solutions to a problem.

An accounting consultant will analyse the numbers deeply and then provide detailed insights, which will help you improve your client’s finances. With the help of accounting consultancy services, you can boost your client’s growth and confidence in you.

Another big difference between accounting and consulting is the payments. An accountant is paid based on the time spent, while a consultant is paid for the precise consulting engagement, apart from time spent on compliance and other technical services.

What Do Accounting Consultants Offer?

An accounting consultant offers diverse services depending on whom they cater to, such as client, consultant, firm or project. But we have narrowed it down to some services that all accounting consultants offer. These services are as follows:

• Financial forecasting
• Financial health evaluation and recommendations
• Year-end financial statement preparation
• Financial statement analysis, interpretation and evaluation
• Advising on regulatory compliance issues
• Profitability analysis
• Accounts payable analysis, including cash flow, workflow, and savings investigations
• Accounting service needs identification
• Accounting process evaluation and system implementation

What’s the Difference Between Advisory Services and Accounting Consulting?

While there are many similarities between advisory services and consulting, there is one fundamental difference: length and engagement purpose. Consulting is for a temporary purpose, which means addressing a specific problem.

When you opt for consultancy, you will get a detailed analysis of the data and the solutions you can use to make your decisions. Once you have accepted the findings, the consultant’s job is done. But that’s not the end because you can approach the same consultant again for a future consultancy service.

In the case of advisory services, you are engaging for all-year advice and insights into your accounting processes. They will work with you side by side and give you the required advice to improve your services. They will guide you towards making better decisions, identifying new markets, improving internal processes, and managing staff. Thus, making advisory services quite different from consultancy.

Is Accounting Consultant Service Right for My Business?

No one can take away your experience of running an accountancy practice. However, there will still be a moment when you will be overwhelmed by multiple accountancy-related problems from your clients. Some of these problems will be complicated, and you will require an experienced helping hand with whom you can consult and make the right decisions. That makes accounting consulting services very important.

With it, you may avoid making a costly mistake that will result in financial loss for your clients and loss of credibility for you.

How Much Will Accounting Consultant Services Cost You?

By now, the question of the cost involved in availing the accounting consulting services must be coming up after all the cost should be manageable for your budget. However, there are no set parameters to decide the cost; there are only factors. These factors are as follows:

• Type of work
• Work location
• Daily commuting distance
• Office-related infrastructure
• Will there be a requirement for buying any special software or tool?
• Duration of engagement
• Are the fees based on fixed charges for consulting or on an hourly basis plus additional expenses?

Conclusion

To conclude, though the cost of using accounting consulting services will cause you some discomfort, the benefits will be immense. An accounting consultant will partner with you to solve some of the most challenging accounting problems and assist you in various ways. With the help of an accounting consultant, you can prove yourself dependable to your clients and also market yourself as trustworthy to other potential clients.

So, after considering your needs and budget, choose the best accounting consulting services from a service provider like Corient Business Solutions. We specialise in offering tailored advisory and consulting services for accounting practices. Our teams also have vast experience in Sage, QuickBooks, Brightpay, Xero, Moneysoft, Earnie, and Star Payroll. Our year-end, VAT, payroll, and bookkeeping outsourcing services are designed to give your practice an edge in the market, thus saving you time to invest in other important tasks. We can connect at your convenience by phone or online meeting to discuss our services in detail.