Australian accounting firms are being told, correctly, that the future of the profession sits in advisory work: forecasting, strategic guidance, the kind of client relationship that goes beyond lodging a return. NAB’s Professional Services report and research from Chartered Accountants ANZ both point the same way, advisory is where the profitability is moving, and where clients increasingly expect their accountant to sit. That shift is real. What gets less attention is what is quietly working against it inside most practices.
Where the hours are actually going
It is rarely a shortage of advisory skill holding a firm back from doing more of this work. It is time. Specifically, the time a firm’s most capable staff spend on identity verification, corporate and PPSR searches, and compliance recordkeeping for every new client, work that has to happen, carries real regulatory weight, and produces no advisory value of its own. Every hour spent moving between systems to complete a single client’s due diligence is an hour not spent on the analysis, forecasting or strategic conversation that firm actually wants to be known for.
InfoTrack’s accounting solution exists to give those hours back. By bringing identity verification, ASIC and PPSR searches, and compliance recordkeeping into a single platform, the due diligence itself does not disappear, and nor should it, but the friction between each step does. No separate logins, no re-entering the same client details twice, no manual recordkeeping to stitch together after the fact.
This is not a case for cutting corners
Client due diligence is not optional, and its importance has only grown under recent Tranche 2 reforms. The case here is not to do less due diligence, it is to ask whether the process built to satisfy that obligation is also, without anyone intending it, the thing keeping senior staff away from higher-value work. A connected platform answers that question directly, the obligation is met in full, and it costs the firm less time to meet it.
Where the time actually goes today
In a fragmented setup, a single client’s onboarding might involve one login to verify identity, another to run an ASIC search, a third for a PPSR check, and a separate spreadsheet or file note to record that it was all done. None of these steps is wasted, each has a genuine purpose. What is wasted is the time spent moving between them, re-entering the same client details, and manually stitching the results into something a compliance officer could point to later.
That movement, not the checks themselves, is where a firm’s capacity quietly leaks away. It rarely shows up as a line item anywhere, which is exactly why it persists.
What this means for the shift toward advisory
For a firm trying to move more of its time toward advisory work, this matters more than it might first appear. The constraint on advisory capacity is rarely a lack of ambition. It is the accumulated weight of process work that has never been questioned, because it has always been done this way.
See how InfoTrack Accounting brings client due diligence into one connected platform, and what it frees your team to spend their time on here.