April 7, 2025
Advisory services are a key offering for many accounting firms. But turning advisory into a scalable, repeatable service? That’s where many firms report that they hit a wall.
As the Fathom community has grown over the last 13 years, we have spoken to hundreds of accountants and advisors from firms of all sizes, who consistently share these blockers:
As Darren Hull , Director at Ventor & Hull Chartered Accountants, puts it:
“If you’re reacting to problems instead of anticipating them, you're already too late. We used to dig through spreadsheets and wait for clients to tell us about cash flow issues. Now, automated dashboards alert us before the client even knows there’s a problem.”
Firms can see the value of engaging more frequently with clients, and they want to help by providing timely insights. But the problem is clients aren’t always asking for more services outright. Instead, clients will engage when meaningful financial insights are placed in front of them; especially when it's simple, visual, and relevant.
That’s why we built the Insights Dashboard and Fathom Portfolio plan. To help firms:
And crucially, we knew you need to be able to do this without adding complexity to your workflow or needing a full Fathom Pro licence for every client. Whether it’s raising the baseline level of service or using data to generate demand for advisory, the goal remains the same: make it easier to deliver more value to more clients.
To better understand the pain points that firms regularly face, we surveyed accountants and business advisors worldwide. The results confirmed what we had been hearing in conversations:
You can read more about these challenges in detail in our latest article, The State of Advisory Services in 2025: Key Challenges and Emerging Solutions.
One of the core takeaways from our research was that firms want to proactively engage clients, but without the right tools, advisory remains reactive. Advisors often only step in when clients raise a red flag, rather than guiding them toward better financial decisions from the outset.
The challenge is compounded by scale. Accounting firms work with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of clients, each with different needs and challenges. Some businesses are thriving, others are struggling, and some are on the verge of major growth. However, without a portfolio-wide view it’s hard to know who to engage, when, and why.
And crucially, clients aren’t always asking for advisory services. In many cases, firms aren’t just finding it hard to deliver advisory; they’re struggling to create the opportunity for it. Generating demand and positioning insights in the right way becomes key.
Historically, business advisory has been a hands-on, one-to-one service, limiting how many clients a firm can serve effectively. Even firms looking to grow their advisory practice struggle with:
Firms need a way to bring structure and scalability to advisory without overburdening their team.
The Insights Dashboard and Summary Reports features were designed to simplify the advisory workflow, giving firms one place to monitor client performance, identify key opportunities, and engage the right clients with meaningful insights.
One of the biggest hurdles to scaling advisory is visibility. Without a structured way to track financial trends across multiple clients, firms struggle to offer proactive advice.
The Insights Dashboard brings together all client data into a single dashboard, allowing firms to:
Instead of spending hours digging through reports, firms gain rapid insight into which clients are performing well, and which may benefit from additional support.
As Patrick Ball CPA, Director, Technology Advisory Operations at Aprio explains:
"One of the biggest benefits of real-time reporting is how much it improves client engagement. Clients actually ask questions about their numbers now, because they finally understand them."
Many firms operate in reactive mode, responding only when clients come to them with concerns. The Insights Dashboard flips this dynamic allowing firms to take a proactive approach by:
Instead of treating all clients the same, firms can tailor their outreach, prioritise the right opportunities and focus their advisory efforts where they will have the most impact.
Darren Hull CA, Director at Venter & Hull, highlights the shift in client perception when advisory is positioned correctly:
"When you package advisory the right way, clients don’t ask ‘How much?’. They ask, ‘How can you help?’"
By providing firms with data-driven insights, Fathom Portfolio can help to bridge the gap between compliance work and high-value advisory conversations.
One of the most time-consuming parts of advisory work is reporting. Many firms spend hours compiling financial summaries, writing commentary, and preparing custom reports for each client. The Summary Reports feature removes this bottleneck by offering:
By automating the reporting process, Fathom Portfolio enables firms to scale their advisory services without increasing their workload, providing value across the entire client base, not just to a handful of high-paying clients.
Jonathan Bareham, Director at Raedan UK explains the importance of quickly providing visual insights to more clients to create engagement and be a conversation starter:
"We like the idea of sending clients a simple report every month that makes them inquisitive (without giving too much away!) so that it opens up an engagement opportunity for our firm. It's a great way to introduce our clients to the idea of management accounts.”
Firms that want to expand their advisory services often run into the same roadblocks. They find it difficult to track financial performance across a large client base, struggle to deliver insights efficiently, and face challenges in demonstrating the value of advisory to clients.
The Insights Dashboard helps overcome these barriers by:
Whether you’re providing insights annually, quarterly, or more frequently, Fathom Portfolio gives you the flexibility to scale advisory services in a way that works for your firm, without having to add a whole new process.
With Fathom Portfolio, advisory becomes scalable, repeatable, and structured, helping firms spot opportunities, share insights faster, and grow revenue.
Want to see how Fathom Portfolio can help your firm help more clients?
Watch the product demo below featuring Luke Ryan, Product Manager at Fathom.
Start your 14-day free trial here.
Ellie is a campaign marketing manager at Fathom, with a degree in branding and marketing. With a background in campaign strategy and creation, Ellie is passionate about showcasing how Fathom can make a real difference to finance professionals and businesses.
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