Cool Tech Tools: Fathom

If your eyes glaze over when you’re presented with financial statements for your business, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs benefit greatly when they can see their financial results in graphical and chart formats. Fathom is the perfect tool to help your numbers come alive so they can become meaningful for you.

Fathom is a company based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia and founded in 2011. The product is also named Fathom and is a cloud-based software application that crunches accounting data and provides multiple views that make analysis easy. In accounting terms, we call this type of software by many names: Financial Dashboard; KPI software, where KPI stands for key performance indicators which are metrics that help you measure your business results; and Business Intelligence (BI) software.

Fathom can present your accounting data in multiple insightful views:

• KPIs – Popular KPIs are pre-loaded, plus you can create and calculate your own. Fathom handles financial KPIs like the current ratio or debt-to-equity ratio, and you can also enter non-financial data such as number of employees and customer satisfaction scores.
• KPI explorer – This display takes on a wheel shape where green is good and red indicates room for improvement.
• Profitability – This line graph shows your business’s breakeven point.
• Cash flow – This bar graph shows in red and green your cash balance fluctuations.
• Trend – This line graph allows you to see at a glance the direction account balances are moving over time.
• Goalseek – This chart allows you to perform what-if analysis, set goals and measure your progress.

You can also generate predefined or custom reports in Fathom. The reports can be scheduled as well as exported to Excel.

Fathom does require a setup process. It integrates with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and MYOB (which is popular in Australia). It’s included in the Advanced version of QuickBooks Online. The steps to set up Fathom include:

1. Updating the data, which is mostly done through integration setup
2. Adding your company profile
3. Mapping Fathom to your Chart of Accounts, which is a very common setup step
4. Selecting your KPIs, which requires some strategy work on your part
5. Setting targets
6. Enabling alerts if desired

There’s a lot to like about Fathom. If you feel like you’d like to start digging deeper into your business’s financial results to find opportunities for more growth and profit, then please contact us anytime.