How to price advisory services: the math I used when I ran a firm

Short answer: price advisory as a fixed monthly fee tied to the decisions you help a client make, not the hours it takes you to prepare. The firms doing this well land in three bands, roughly $1,500 to $3,000 a month for oversight, $3,000 to $6,000 for insight, and $6,000 to $12,000 and up for CFO-level work. Only about one in ten CAS practices still bills hourly, and they are the ones with the lowest margins.

I ran an outsourced CFO practice for five years before I built Clockwork. Most of what I got wrong early was pricing, so this is the version I wish someone had handed me.

Start with what the client is buying

Nobody buys a forecast. They buy the answer to a question that is keeping them up: can I make payroll in March, can I afford this hire, what happens if the big customer leaves. When you price by the hour you are asking the client to pay for your effort. When you price by the month you are asking them to pay for the answer being there every time they need it. The second one is worth more, and it is easier to sell, because the client already knows what the anxiety costs them.

So the first thing I would do with a new advisory client was write down the three questions they actually asked in the first meeting. That list became the scope. Everything in the package existed to answer those three questions on a schedule.

The three bands, and what goes in each

These ranges line up with what the CPA.com and AICPA CAS benchmark data shows and with what most firms I talk to are charging in 2026. Adjust for your market, but do not adjust the structure.

• Oversight, $1,500 to $3,000 a month. Monthly close review, a 13-week cash view, a short written note on what changed and why. One 30-minute call. This is the entry point for a client who has never had anyone look forward.
• Insight, $3,000 to $6,000 a month. Everything above, plus a rolling 12-month forecast, budget versus actual with commentary, and a monthly meeting where you walk through two or three decisions. This is where most of the margin in a CAS practice lives.
• CFO-level, $6,000 to $12,000 and up. Scenario modeling, hiring plans, financing and pricing decisions, board or lender prep. You are in the room for the big calls. Practices with this tier report roughly 30 percent higher monthly recurring revenue per client than practices that stop at insight.

The number that actually sets your price

Here is the mistake I made for two years. I priced from my cost up. I would estimate the hours, multiply by a rate, add a margin, and hand over a number. It always came out too low, because the client was not comparing me to my hours. They were comparing me to the cost of the decision going wrong.

The better anchor is the size of the decisions you touch. A client doing $4 million in revenue who is about to hire three people and sign a lease has maybe $600,000 of decisions on the table this year. Charging $4,000 a month to get those right is not a hard conversation. Charging $4,000 a month for "monthly reporting" is.

A rule of thumb that held up across my client base: the annual advisory fee should sit somewhere between half a percent and one and a half percent of the client's revenue, with the higher end for smaller, faster-changing businesses. Below half a percent you are underpriced. Above two percent you had better be making the decisions with them, not just reporting on them.

Fixed fee, and raise it every year

Ignition's 2025 benchmark had 54 percent of firms on fixed fees and 80 percent planning a five to ten percent increase for 2026. Put the increase in the engagement letter from day one. The clients who leave over a seven percent increase were going to leave anyway. The ones who stay stop asking about the invoice, which is the whole point of fixed pricing.

What kills the margin

Pricing gets most of the attention, but two things quietly ate more of my margin than any discount ever did.

The first was the forecast build. Every new client meant a week of someone senior mapping the chart of accounts, building the model, reconciling it to the ledger, and formatting the deliverable. I charged for the month. I ate the week. The second was the monthly refresh, which was a smaller version of the same thing. If the deliverable takes a day to prepare and an hour to deliver, your effective rate on the day is close to zero.

Both problems have the same fix, which is to stop building the model by hand. That is why I built Clockwork, and it is also why the benchmark data shows practices that invest in technology serving about 50 percent more clients per professional. The software is not the advisory. It is what lets the advisory be the only thing you charge for.

A pricing sheet you can use tomorrow

• Write down the client's three real questions. That is the scope.
• Pick the band those questions belong to. Do not invent a fourth band.
• Check the annual fee against half a percent to one and a half percent of revenue.
• Fixed monthly, annual increase in the letter, no hourly anything.
• Make sure the deliverable costs you an hour, not a day. If it costs a day, fix that before you take the next client.

Questions I get on this

Should I offer a lower "reporting only" tier? No. Reporting without a forward view is compliance with a nicer cover. Clients cancel it first when money gets tight.

What if the client pushes back on price? Go back to the three questions. If the price still feels high against the decisions on the table, you scoped the wrong questions or you have the wrong client.

How many advisory clients can one person handle? With hand-built models, six to eight before quality slips. With the model building itself, the constraint becomes meetings, and 15 to 20 is realistic.