CAS combines recurring accounting work with ongoing financial guidance, helping firms move from reactive compliance to more proactive, insight-driven client service.
By now, you’ve probably heard of CAS, CAAS, advisory accounting, accounting and advisory services—or whatever you want to call it. This shift has been underway in the accounting industry for years, and it’s still gathering speed. Here’s what it actually means for your firm.
What is CAS Accounting?
First, let’s get our acronyms straight. There’s still debate in the accounting community about whether this model is called CAS (which could stand for Client Accounting Services or Client Advisory Services) or CAAS (Client Accounting and Advisory Services). For our purposes, we’ll refer to it as CAS accounting.
Now that we know what to call it, let’s talk about what it is. Historically, accounting firms focused almost exclusively on backward-looking compliance—annual tax returns, year-end filings, and historical reporting. CAS builds on that foundation by turning accounting into an ongoing operational function. Firms take on the recurring accounting work that keeps a business running day to day: bookkeeping, financial statement preparation, accounts payable, sales tax filings, and the monthly close.
That recurring work produces current, reliable financial data, and that data is what makes forward-looking advice possible. Bookkeeping is the engine that drives advisory. When the books are clean and current, you can tell a client what their cash position will look like in 90 days, which customers are quietly consuming their margin, and whether now is the right time to hire. Compliance work and advisory work reinforce each other, and each one makes the other more valuable.
Shifting the Focus to Partnership
Instead of constantly hounding your clients for the right documents, the work becomes more of a partnership, and the accountant is seen as part of the business’s team.
Accounting firms looking to add advisory services to their strategy don’t need to offload their compliance clients—these clients are still great, and it’s OK to have both advisory clients and compliance clients.
When CAS firms are looking for new clients, it’s important to ask “How can our services help you on the compliance side AND the advisory side?” Rather than making sure the tax return is simply turned in on time, CAS firms ask themselves “Can we look at this tax return and actually add further value and perspective?”
Advisory Scales When It Lives in Your Systems
Here’s where a lot of CAS practices stall. Advisory feels great when one partner delivers it for ten favorite clients. It gets much harder at a hundred.
The firms that scale it build advisory into how the firm already runs. When client data, workflow, communication, and billing live in one connected system, your team stops reconciling spreadsheets before every client meeting and starts showing up with answers. Standardized workflows and recurring tasks let your whole team deliver advisory consistently, with client context shared at the client record.
That consistency is what creates capacity, and capacity is what lets you take on more advisory clients without burning out the people doing the work. The numbers bear this out: firms strongly committed to continuous investment in technology serve a median of 100 clients, compared with 67 across all respondents.
Adopting a CAS Model
Finding a niche client base can be helpful when adopting a CAS model, since it allows you to provide more service to your clients, considering you’ll quickly become well-connected in that niche market and be able to provide expert advice. The benchmark data backs this up: practices earning more than half their revenue from defined industry niches report 38% higher median CAS revenue and 51% higher net revenue per client.
CAS firms are changing the narrative about accounting—you’re selling your knowledge and expertise, not just your hours. That’s why most CAS practices have moved away from hourly billing, with only 10% still using it as their primary pricing method, down from 53% in 2018, the first year of the survey. Instead, firms scope the work upfront and bill through fixed fees, monthly retainers, packaged service tiers, or engagement-based pricing, spelling out exactly what the client receives.
The payoff runs both directions. Your firm gets predictable, year-round cash flow and gets paid before the work is done. Your client gets clear communication and a relationship that can grow into a real partnership, with no hidden fees.
The Growth and Future of CAS Accounting
When CPA.com released its most recent benchmark survey, it called CAS the fastest-growing service area in public accounting—and the data supported it. Participating firms reported a median CAS growth rate of 17% and collectively projected their CAS revenue to roughly double over the following three years. Firms generating significant revenue from CFO-level and business insights advisory work earned more than 30% higher monthly recurring revenue than their peers.
If you’re looking to stay ahead of the competition—and keep up with the industry—it might be time to build advisory into your firm’s operating model. This guide to structuring advisory services is a great place to start.
Canopy is an all-in-one practice management platform built for firms delivering advisory. Client data, workflow, bookkeeping, communication, and billing live in one system, so your team spends less time gathering information and more time giving clients answers. See how Canopy supports advisory teams.
