Most guides on how to price advisory services start from a blank page: pick a model, build three tiers, practise the value conversation. Useful, but it misses where most firms actually are. You are already doing advisory work. You are just not charging for it.
It happens in the reply to "quick question on margin?", the call about whether the client can afford a new hire, the heads-up that cash will be tight in March. That is advisory. It sits inside a bookkeeping or compliance fee, priced at zero. This piece is about pricing that work properly, starting with the clients you already have.
The advisory you already give away
Pick five clients and look back over the last quarter. Count every interaction that was not production or compliance:
- Questions answered by email or phone ("why is profit down?", "can we afford this?").
- Ad hoc reports pulled on request.
- Warnings you raised before the client noticed a problem.
- Decisions you helped them make, even informally.
Then put a rough time against each. This is often the work that makes clients stay, and none of it appears on an invoice. Our guess is that the total will surprise you. Whatever it is, it is the starting point for your advisory pricing, because it is proof clients already value the work enough to ask for it.
Why hourly rates make the problem worse
The most common fix is a premium hourly rate. Ignition's survey of CAS users found firms are comfortable charging advisory at 120% to 125% of their compliance rate, with some going to 150% or more.
That helps on big projects. It does nothing for the five-minute questions, because nobody bills a client for five minutes. So the small, frequent, high-value advice stays free, and the firm's best people spend their week on it.
Hourly pricing also punishes you for getting faster. If a good system answers the margin question in seconds instead of an hour, an hourly fee drops to near zero. The value to the client has not changed. Your price has.
How to price advisory services in three layers
The firms that charge well for advisory tend to stop selling time and start selling access, attention and decisions. A simple structure that fits most CAS and fractional CFO practices:
Layer 1: Answers on demand
The client can get a straight answer to a question about their numbers whenever they need one: cash position, overdue invoices, margin by product, spend against budget. Today this is the free email traffic. Packaged, it is a monthly fee for always-on access.
Layer 2: Someone watching
The firm, or a system the firm runs, watches the numbers and flags what needs attention between month-ends: a margin slide, a duplicated supplier payment, a customer paying later than usual. The client pays for not being surprised.
Layer 3: Decisions
Forecasts, scenarios, the quarterly meeting, the "should we open a second site?" conversation. This is classic advisory and the layer most pricing guides focus on. Jirav's framework, for example, sets out tiered FP&A retainers from about $1,500 to $15,000 a month, with model builds priced separately.
Layers 1 and 2 are what make layer 3 sellable. A client who has had a month of straight answers and two early warnings is far easier to move into a forecasting engagement than one who has only ever seen a year-end pack.
Price on the size of the decision, not the hours
For each layer, ask what the client stands to gain or avoid, not how long it takes you.
An illustrative example (our numbers, not a benchmark): a distribution client turning over £4m runs on thin margins. A two-point slip in gross margin, caught a quarter late, costs them around £20,000. Monitoring that catches it in week two is worth a meaningful share of that, regardless of whether it took your team ten minutes or ten hours.
A few practical rules:
- Anchor on the client's numbers. Revenue, margin, cash headroom. Frame the fee against the decisions they make each month.
- Keep the layers separate on the proposal. Clients can see what they are buying and choose their level.
- Offer three options. Clarity HQ's framework notes that most clients pick the middle option when given three packages.
- Keep compliance on fixed fees. Melio's pricing guide suggests fixed fees for compliance and value-based pricing for advisory, with hybrids where they fit. That split keeps the core retainer simple.
Moving existing clients without losing them
The hard part is not the price. It is telling a client that something they got for free now costs money. Three ways to make that easier:
Add before you charge. Introduce layer 1 or 2 as a visible service for a month or two at the existing fee. Show what it caught or answered. Then propose the new package at renewal.
Reprice at a natural moment. Annual fee reviews, a change in scope, a new entity or a funding round are all moments when a client expects the conversation.
Start with the clients who ask the most. The ones who email weekly already know the value. They are your first converts, and the ones costing you the most margin today.
Do not try to convert everyone. Some clients only want compliance. Price that honestly, and stop answering advisory questions on the side for free.
Make the delivery cheap enough to sell at scale
Pricing advisory only works if delivering it does not need a senior for every question. If layer 1 means a manager pulling a report every time a client asks, you will either underprice it or stop selling it.
This is where the tooling matters. Plain-language querying covers layer 1; agentic monitoring covers layer 2. Some firms resell Pastel as exactly this: their clients get answers and alerts under the firm's service, the firm bills for it, and the team behind it serves more clients, since Pastel cuts the manual, repetitive work of bookkeepers, payroll and controllers by up to 80%.
Whatever you use, the test is the same: can you deliver layers 1 and 2 to fifty clients without hiring for it? If not, sort the delivery before you sell it. The order of that work is in our piece on scaling CAS without hiring ahead of revenue.
A four-week plan
- Week 1: Log the free advisory on five clients. Questions, reports, warnings, decisions.
- Week 2: Group it into the three layers and write one sentence on what each is worth to the client.
- Week 3: Build three packages. Keep compliance fixed; price advisory on value.
- Week 4: Pick the two clients who ask the most and take them the proposal at their next review.
The short version
Knowing how to price advisory services starts with admitting you already deliver it. Find the advice you give away, package it as answers, attention and decisions, and price it on what it is worth to the client. The hours were never the point.