Stop Billing for Data Entry. Start Charging for Judgment

In 2018, more than half of client advisory practices billed mainly by the hour. Today one in ten do. That single shift, reported in the AICPA’s 2024 client advisory services benchmark survey, tells you most of what you need to know about where the profession is heading. Firms stopped selling time because the work that filled those hours, the manual coding and cleanup behind a clean set of books, moved to software.

I spent more than four years at Intuit building tools for self-employed taxpayers, and I watched automatic categorization move from a feature people second-guessed to a default they assume. Bank feeds, receipt capture, and machine categorization now handle the bulk of routine bookkeeping, accurately enough to trust on most transactions and review on the rest. It already runs inside your clients’ apps.

If software does the data entry, what are you selling? The firms with the best answer are pricing past the trend.

The numbers point one way

Client advisory services, the work that sits on top of clean books, is the fastest-growing area in public accounting, according to that same survey. CAS practices reported median revenue growth of 17% in 2023, against the 9.1% rise in net client fees the broader profession logged in the AICPA’s National Management of an Accounting Practice survey. Practices that generate significant revenue from CFO-level advisory earned more than 30% higher monthly recurring revenue. And firms committed to continuous investment in technology served a median of 100 clients against 67 for all respondents, roughly 50% more with higher fees per professional.

Value is leaving data entry and moving to judgment.

The firms automating the bottom of the stack serve more clients and charge more for the part a machine cannot do.

Software stumbles where judgment starts

Software codes the obvious transactions. It stumbles on the ones that need context. Should this purchase be capitalized or expensed? Is that transfer an owner’s draw or a business expense? Did a personal charge land on the business card? Those calls carry real tax and compliance weight, and a trained professional is the only party equipped to make them.

Take a landscaper whose software cleanly tags a $40,000 truck as a vehicle expense. Technically correct. Deducting that truck through standard mileage, actual expenses, or a Section 179 election is a decision worth thousands of dollars, and no categorization engine will make it. Clients keep paying for that judgment because the cost of getting it wrong lands on them.

The move to make

Three steps turn this shift from threat to advantage. First, stop billing for keystrokes and price around outcomes, the way nine in ten CAS practices already do. Second, build a review workflow instead of a re-keying one: let software take the first pass, then spend your hours on the exceptions and the decisions. Third, insist on tools that show their work. When a client adopts software that codes transactions on its own, demand an audit trail you can review and override. A black box you cannot check becomes your liability at filing time.

None of this means reinventing your firm. Pick one recurring client, hand the mechanical work to software, and reinvest the saved hours into a real planning conversation.

The data entry is leaving, and it was never the part of the job worth protecting. Judgment remains. So does the planning conversation clients trust you to lead. Both pay better than keystrokes ever did.

Alon Livshitz is the co-founder and CEO of KiwiBooks (kiwibooks.ai), an AI-native bookkeeping platform built for small businesses, sole proprietors, landlords, and the accountants and tax professionals who serve them. Before founding KiwiBooks, he spent more than four years at Intuit as a staff product manager leading QuickBooks Self-Employed and working on TurboTax.

Sources

Hourly-billing shift (53% in 2018 to 10% today), 17% CAS median revenue growth for 2023, fastest-growing service area, 30% higher monthly recurring revenue for CFO-level advisory, and the 100-versus-67 client comparison: 2024 AICPA PCPS Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey, as reported by the Journal of Accountancy.
Broader-profession growth of 9.1% in net client fees: AICPA National Management of an Accounting Practice (MAP) Survey, 2023, as cited in the Journal of Accountancy coverage above.