Dashboards and statements aren’t enough—accountants must help clients turn data into action.

The Disruptors

With Liz Farr

Joe Woodard sees a disconnect between what accountants think they’re selling and what clients want to buy. Many accountants still think they’re selling time, but as Woodard points out with a vivid analogy, that’s not what clients care about.

“If I'm going into CVS and I need Tums,” he explains, imagine if CVS charged you more because “I hung around in their store for twice as long to buy the Tums as I needed to, I took a circuitous path. Maybe I looked at some of the kids’ toys for an upcoming birthday party where they’re going to charge me twice as much for the Tums.”

This absurd scenario mirrors what accounting firms do to clients when the cost of delivering the service depends on the time it takes to do the work, so “the value of the product changes based on some arbitrary time metric,” Woodard says. “As long as that’s the case, there’s always going to be a resistance to the billing for selling the wrong product.”

However, even among firms that have adopted value pricing, a disconnect remains because the focus is on deliverables rather than outcomes.