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Posted: 26 March 2025

Your Roadmap to Premium Advisory Services Starts Here

Accountants Minute 399

Advising a growth-focused client is one of the most rewarding challenges an accounting professional can take on. It’s exciting, thought-provoking – and it stretches your firm beyond compliance into high-value advisory.

When a business begins scaling up, it needs more than just tax returns and annual accounts. It needs a team of advisors who understand the full spectrum of commercial strategy – from legal and marketing, to AI, software, and leadership development. And accountants? You’re perfectly placed to lead this charge.

Be the Leader, Not Just the Recorder

Traditionally, accountants have been seen as the historians of business – the ones who report what was. But growth clients don’t need a historian. They need a storyteller – someone who can interpret the future of their business through numbers, strategy, and insight.

This is where the opportunity lies.

With the ESS BIZTOOLS Advanced Package, your firm can confidently step into this role, helping growth-ready clients establish the strong foundations they’ll need to scale successfully.

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Laying the Groundwork: Core Advisory Services

Due Diligence Review: Go deeper than compliance. A strategic review of your client’s operations provides insight far beyond the numbers in a tax return – giving your team ‘an inch wide and a mile deep’ understanding of their business.

Business Planning: Don’t just write the plan – facilitate it. Use a structured agenda and real data to empower leadership teams to take ownership of their business direction. Your role is to coordinate, extract insights, and guide discussion—not work in isolation.

Predictive Accounting Reports: Once the plan is in place, it’s time to map the future. Think:

  • Budgets
  • Cash Flow Forecasts
  • Key Drivers (inventory, capex, R&D, debtors, etc)
  • Projected Balance Sheets

These become the benchmarks that allow monthly comparison, enabling timely decisions – not reactive ones.

This is where the accountant becomes the storyteller, interpreting the financial narrative behind the business vision and challenging assumptions before real money is on the line.

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52-Week Business Enhancement System

Growth-focused businesses need constant visibility. The days of “set and forget” reports are over.

Offer clients a system that delivers:

  • Daily updates on yesterday’s results
  • Weekly Profit & Performance Reports by business unit
  • Monthly reviews with comparisons to budgets and rolling forecasts

This rhythm of reporting creates rhythm in decision-making – fixing problems fast and avoiding costly delays.

Meetings with Meaning

Help clients establish a Rhythm of Meetings – short daily check-ins, in-depth weekly strategy sessions, and monthly financial reviews. This structured communication builds accountability and ensures no issue flies under the radar.

Scalable Systems for Scalable Businesses

Our Advanced Product Package provides your firm with templates, videos, tools, and systems across all the key advisory pillars:

Strategy – Execution – Cash

It includes:

  • Business planning tools
  • Management accounting templates
  • KPI & breakeven guides
  • Early-Stage Innovation Company resources
  • Crowd Sourced Funding Equity Raising processes
  • A Virtual CFO service model

Plus, you’ll receive 10 training sessions via Zoom and our monthly Business Plus client newsletter – ready for you to white-label and send.

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Future-Proof Your Firm

As Mark Wickersham FCA – Principal of the Value Pricing Academy – put it at the recent AI Automation in Accounting webinar:

“Compliance work as we know it today will disappear before the end of this decade—or perhaps even earlier.”

To stay relevant, accountants must create more value and differentiate their services. That’s exactly what the ESS BIZTOOLS suite enables you to do.

Ready to Get Started?

You can start earning advisory fees from ESS BIZTOOLS products within 1–2 weeks.

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE AND TO SUBSCRIBE

👉 Or join our complimentary webinar on Wednesday 2 April at 10am AEST.

REGISTER HERE

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Visit our website – www.essbiztools.com.au – to discover the detailed overview of the services provided by ESS BIZTOOLS. You are also welcome to contact us on 0418 190 181 or email .

Discover Systems to Assist SMEs Achieve Success

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Join us for an exclusive webinar series, free of charge, where we will dive into powerful solutions designed to give your firm a competitive edge. Discover how our innovative tools can help you streamline operations, enhance advisory services and drive success for your SME clients and, in turn, your firm. Register to your preferred webinar below.

Advanced Package – Wednesday 2 April at 10am AEST 

Financial Forecasting Package – Wednesday 9 April at 11am AEST

Don’t miss this opportunity to gain actionable insights and explore how ESS BIZTOOLS can transform the way you support your SME clients.

ESS BIZTOOLS Podcast

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In this episode of Accountant’s Minute Podcast, Peter Towers urges accountants, bookkeepers, and advisors to move beyond compliance work and embrace value-added services. With automation rapidly reducing tax-related tasks, now is the time to step up as trusted advisors, offering strategic insights to help SMEs thrive.

Discover why your future depends on advisory services—and how you can start the shift today.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST

Listen to more Accountants Minute Podcast episodes here

Want to know more?

Visit www.essbiztools.com.au.

If you would like to have a discussion about how this concept of virtual CFO services can be supplied by Australian accounting firms please ring our Managing Director, Peter Towers, on (07) 4724 1118 and we will arrange a complimentary 45-minute Zoom meeting to discuss your firm’s position and to give you our advice.

We believe that this is the blueprint for the delivery of an enhanced range of services by Australian Accounting and Bookkeeping firms to assist SME businesses to add value to their businesses and to assist accountants and bookkeepers not only to attract but to retain outstanding talent who want to be involved in the delivery of “real accounting services”.

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