At a glance
- Transition from compliance work to deeper, strategic advisory services.
- Use a question bank to spark insightful conversations with clients.
- Strengthen your role as a trusted adviser, not a salesperson.
- Adapt the tool for onboarding, reviews, and identifying new opportunities.
DOWNLOAD the Business Health Check Question Bank here
The role of small and medium-sized practices (SMPs) is evolving fast. More than ever, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) clients are looking to their accountants not just for compliance, but for insights, clarity, and strategic partnership.
And yet, many practitioners still find themselves asking: “How do I move from tax and reporting to deeper advisory services without feeling like a salesperson?”
Insightful conversations with clients are the answer to unlock this conundrum. To support practitioners in this endeavour, I have been working with colleagues from IFAC and the SMP Advisory Group (SMPAG) on a practical tool designed to help SMPs spark conversations that reveal client needs, challenges, and opportunities in a way that’s structured, respectful, and valuable.
The Business Health Check Question Bank is a tool that can help practitioners leverage their role as trusted advisers to help unlock mutually beneficial deeper client value.
From compliance to conversation
To open up dialogue with SME clients, practitioners need to be empowered to ask better, more holistic questions. For SMEs, who better than their trusted adviser to ask “What aspects of your business keep you awake at night” or “What would you change about your business if you could”? The practitioner’s goal is to open a safe and structured conversation with SME clients at an appropriate time. This might be during a strategic planning session or a quarterly review, or even when onboarding a new engagement.
The Business Health Check Question Bank helps practitioners move from transactional interactions to strategic discussions, allowing them to better understand what’s happening behind the financial data we are accustomed to dealing with.
Born from practice
The idea for the tool came from my work as an SMP practitioner in New Zealand. Checklists were available either through government agencies or from private providers, but I developed my own questions that reflected my clients’ experiences. The resulting question bank encouraged deep thinking and helped guide business reviews with SME clients. What I found was transformative:
- It gave me a less invasive way to ask about sensitive areas, such as succession, debt, or retirement.
- I could ask questions to generate insights in a structured and respectful way. This avoided anything feeling like a sales pitch on either side.
- I could use the information gathered to form a deeper understanding of my clients’ needs, sometimes revealing challenges the client had never articulated.
- It became a relationship-strengthening exercise that positioned our firm as a long-term business partner.
That experience showed me the potential of such a tool to deepen client trust and make advisory services more natural, intuitive, and impactful.
Gaining value from the tool in your jurisdiction
The Business Health Check Question Bank is not prescriptive. It is intended to be shaped by cultural, regional, and sectoral context. What works for a micro-retail business in Malaysia may differ from a professional services firm in Canada. There’s no single “right way” to use this tool. In fact, its strength lies in its adaptability.
SMPs may choose to:
- Use it while onboarding new clients—as a discovery tool—to understand their business and their pain points
- Frame annual or quarterly reviews using its themes as discussion anchors
- Assign different sections to different team members, encouraging internal specialization (e.g., one staff member leads marketing reviews, another leads finance)
- Initiate value-based referrals if a client issue lies beyond your firm’s scope (e.g., legal or cybersecurity advice)
- Spot training or system improvement needs, such as when clients struggle with tech integration or compliance tracking
Use of the tool may also help firm leaders identify trends across their client base. If several clients lack succession plans or retirement clarity, that may signal an opportunity to develop a workshop or another bundled solution.
A gateway to practice transformation
The Business Health Check Question Bank aligns directly with IFAC’s Practice Transformation Action Plan, which encourages SMPs to evolve business models, embrace digital tools, and offer broader advisory services.
It complements other IFAC tools, such as the Guide to Practice Management for SMPs, and can be tailored or translated by Professional Accountancy Organizations (PAOs) for local needs. PAOs are also encouraged to promote the checklist for the benefit of their members.
This tool is more than just a set of questions—it is a shift in mindset for the firm using it. It underscores how we can be seen as trusted advisers rather than just another service provider in the eyes of our clients. In my own practice, this approach transformed client relationships and deepened the value we were able to deliver. I believe it can do the same for other SMPs. As the business environment continues to evolve, tools like this help SMPs stay relevant, resilient, and above all trusted.
This article originally appeared on the IFAC Knowledge Gateway. Copyright © 2025 by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). All rights reserved. Used with permission of IFAC. Contact [email protected] for permission to reproduce, store, or transmit this document.
