Offering more services to existing clients

How an accounting firm spots services an existing client may need, raises them without hard selling, and respects independence limits for audit clients.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

Accountants are often uncomfortable with the word "selling", and with good reason: clients trust their accountant precisely because the accountant is not trying to sell them something. Yet the same clients regularly struggle with problems the firm could solve. The client who does its own payroll on a spreadsheet and dreads every tax certificate season. The growing company still on a compilation when its lender has started asking for more. The owner who has never had a conversation about what happens to the business when they retire.

Raising those services is not hard selling if it starts from the client's situation and ends with the client's decision. This article sets out a quiet, evidence-based way to do it with what Achekam holds about each client, and the independence limits that apply when the client is an audit client.

Reading Client 360 for gaps

Every client in Achekam has a Client 360 record, which reads the client's services, contacts, timeline and profile from the server. That combination is the starting point.

Look at three things side by side:

• Services: what the client actually buys from the firm today.
• Profile: what kind of entity it is and what the firm knows about it.
• Timeline: what has happened recently, such as requests, queries and changes.

Gaps show up where the profile and timeline suggest a need that the services list does not cover. A company that keeps sending payroll questions but does not buy payroll. A client whose timeline shows repeated late information for its year-end, which might be eased by monthly bookkeeping support. A trust whose services list has no tax return.

Do this review at a natural moment, such as the annual planning meeting or the roll-forward of the year-end job, not in the middle of a deadline crunch. A short list per client, agreed with the partner, is enough: one or two genuine needs, not a catalogue.

The services statement as a conversation

From a client's Billing tab in Client 360, staff can issue a numbered statement of the services the client buys and their fees, as a PDF on the firm's letterhead, and e-mail it.

That statement is a useful conversation opener precisely because it is not a sales document. It shows the client, plainly, what they currently receive and pay for. Sent before an annual meeting, it invites the client's own questions, such as whether the firm could take over the payroll they still run themselves. A client who raises a service themselves is far more likely to take it up than one who is pitched it. The mechanics are covered in the statement of services and fees.

A tailored e-mail from the record

When the firm does raise a service, do it from the client's record. From Client 360 or a client contact, staff can have AI draft an e-mail from a preset, edit it, attach documents and send it, and the message is kept on the record.

A good message of this kind is short and specific:

1. It names what the firm has noticed, in the client's terms.
2. It explains in a sentence or two how the service would help.
3. It offers a conversation, not a price.
4. It makes it easy to say no.

Edit the draft until it sounds like the partner who knows the client, not a newsletter. Keeping the message on the record also means the next person to speak to the client knows the offer was made.

Quoting from the catalogue

If the client wants to go ahead, quote properly. A firm can keep a service catalogue whose prices stay blank until a person types them, and staff can save quotation templates and start quotations from them. A proposal or quotation is built from fee lines priced by a person, with VAT at the standard rate for the firm's jurisdiction, and Achekam recalculates the total from the lines.

For existing clients, a quotation template for each common add-on, such as monthly payroll or quarterly management accounts, keeps the offer consistent and quick. The person pricing it should look at the client's existing fees in the services statement, so that the new quote fits the relationship rather than contradicting it.

Independence limits for audit clients

For audit clients, an additional service is not only a commercial decision. Providing non-assurance services to an audit client can create threats to independence, and some services are not permitted at all for certain audit clients. The International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants has tightened this area: its announcement on strengthening auditor independence explains the revisions to the Code's non-assurance services and fee provisions, including the ban on services that create a self-review threat for public interest entity audit clients. National requirements in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya build on the Code, and the firm should apply the one that governs it.

Achekam records independence information but does not make this judgement. Staff record annual independence declarations and any interest, relationship or gift involving a client, and anyone can check whether a person has an active independence exception for a client. There is, however, no way to approve an independence declaration in Achekam, and assigning a person to an engagement does not check the independence register.

So the control is a person. Before any additional service is offered to an audit client:

Where the answer is that the firm cannot provide the service, it can still help the client by pointing them to someone who can.

For the client record that underpins all of this, see what to keep on each client record.

At the next partners' meeting, pick five clients each, read their Client 360 records for one genuine gap, and agree who will raise it and how. Review what happened a quarter later.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.