The client questions IT consultants hear most — and where to send each one

It starts with servers and ends somewhere else entirely. You have admin access to their systems, you have seen their invoicing, you were sensible during the outage at 2am. So the founder asks what you think about the £180,000 sitting idle in the business account. The contractor you subcontract to asks whether he should bother with a pension through his limited company. A client mid-acquisition asks what you would do with the proceeds. None of these are IT questions. All of them are compliments. The trap is that competence in one technical field feels transferable, and clients encourage the illusion. Financial advice is a regulated activity; tax structuring belongs to accountants. Answering off the cuff risks their money and your professional indemnity in one move.

Plenty, actually — as long as it stays factual. You can mention that employer pension contributions are normally an allowable business expense, which is why so many limited-company contractors use them, without saying whether this contractor should. You can explain that IR35 status turns on working practices — substitution, control, mutuality of obligation — not on what the contract says at the top. You can point out that cyber insurance policies frequently exclude claims where basic controls like MFA were absent, which is squarely your territory and worth repeating loudly. And you can say the most useful sentence in consulting: that is a great question for a specialist, and I know one. Short. Honest. It costs you nothing and positions you as connected rather than limited.

Think of it as a switch statement with four cases.

• Surplus company cash, pensions, personal investing — a regulated financial adviser; the FCA Register confirms authorisation in under two minutes.
• IR35, incorporation, extraction, sale structuring — an accountant, ideally one who lives with contractors and agencies daily.
• What happens to the business if the founder dies — an estate planner, because shares pass under a will or intestacy like any other asset, and most shareholder agreements never anticipated it.
• General orientation — MoneyHelper, free and impartial.

Warm introductions beat lists of names. SmartPeer, for what it is worth, exists to make those referrals trackable and properly disclosed. The consultant who routes well gets remembered at renewal time. Every time.