A referral income guide for IT consultants: from introduction to commission statement

IT consultancy puts you inside businesses at unusually revealing moments. The contractor on £600 a day who mentions, while you are troubleshooting his stack, that IR35 changes have him rethinking his limited company — and his pension, which does not exist. The MSP founder with £350,000 of retained profit earning nothing, because extracting it feels like a tax problem she keeps postponing. The SaaS owner heading for an exit who has never spoken to anyone about what happens to the proceeds.

You are not their accountant, and you are certainly not their financial adviser. But you are trusted, technically literate, and present — a combination that makes clients ask you things they would never book a meeting to ask anyone else. The wrong response is amateur opinion; the FCA perimeter does not care that the advice was casual. The right response is an introduction to someone regulated. That introduction can be paid.

Treat it like a well-run handover ticket. Stage one: consent — the client agrees to the introduction, confirmed in writing, which for data protection purposes is non-negotiable. Stage two: discovery — the regulated adviser runs a fact-find covering income, assets, goals and risk tolerance; every recommendation and its regulatory consequences belong to them, not you. Stage three: completion — if the client proceeds, the adviser charges an initial fee, often a percentage of the assets advised on or a fixed project fee.

Stage four is where you re-enter: a pre-agreed introducer share, typically a fifth to a quarter of that initial fee, paid to you and documented on a commission statement identifying the case. Elapsed time from introduction to statement is usually six to ten weeks. Some arrangements add a small trailing share while the client stays advised — recurring revenue, a concept the MSP side of your brain already appreciates.

The rules reduce to three invariants. Disclose: the client must know, in writing and before proceeding, that you may be paid for the introduction and that they can choose any adviser they like. Verify: check the adviser on the FCA Register — the permission set, not merely the firm's existence — before the first referral, and periodically after. Log: date, client, consent, disclosure, outcome, statement. If you can reconcile every payment to a logged introduction, you are audit-proof; if you cannot, you are guessing.

This is, frankly, a data-integrity problem, and you solve harder ones daily. Referral platforms such as SmartPeer handle the tracking and generate the disclosure letter per case, which reduces your overhead to the conversation itself. Start small: one vetted adviser, five referrals, review the statements. If the pipeline behaves — clean handoffs, happy clients, reconciled payments — scale it. If it does not, fix the process before the volume. Standard engineering.